Back in 2009, then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was denounced for a report warning of the threat posed by right-wing extremists and white supremacists, NAACP official Sherrilyn Ifill said Sunday, but African-Americans have lived with that threat for many decades.
"There is a feeling of vulnerability, of not being taken seriously," Ifill, the president and director-general of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told CBS News'
"Face the Nation" program.""If you call yourself a patriot, you say you love this country, first and foremost you care about the safety of the citizens."
In her report, Ifill said, Napolitano suggested that extremist groups were ramping up their efforts and there was a threat that they would radicalize people like Dylann Storm Roof, who is accused of the murders of nine members of Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, including its pastor, State Sen. Clementa Pinckney.
But that report led to her being denounced, pointed out Ifill.
"Then minority leader, now Majority Leader John Boehner specifically denounced her for referring [to or] using the term terrorist to describe what he said are American citizens who disagree with the direction that Washington Democrats are taking the nation," said Ifill.
Napolitano's report was issued after a massacre in a Sikh temple, where six people were killed, and after the murders of three Pittsburgh police officers. In both cases, Ifill said, which were carried out by extremist groups, the deaths were politicized.
The report claimed extremist groups could use the nation's poor economy, as well as the election of the nation's first black president, Barack Obama, as recruiting tools. It came under fire from Republicans, who complained that the Obama administration was singling out conservatives and military veterans, a
report from CBS News in 2009 said.
The part of the report that particularly drew Boehner's ire was a claim that military veterans who found it difficult to re-enter civilian life were susceptible to recruitment, as was the case with Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in a bombing attack on the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.
"What we have seen too often is the safety of African American citizens sacrificed for the purpose of partisan gain," Ifill said Sunday. "People are afraid to say the truth. Allowing themselves to traffic in the tools of white supremacy like the Confederate flag. This has to stop."
Such extremists, said Ifill, are out there and "we can't find every single one of them, but we have law enforcement apparatus in this country that is reported to be one of the best in the world."
However, it will take a different approach for law enforcement to use their power to "find these kinds of individuals and to stop this radicalization," she said.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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