Non secular, civil rights leaders urge Congress to take actions to fight home terrorism

Religious and civil rights officials at a Senate hearing on Tuesday outlined several concrete steps Congress members should take to combat domestic terrorism and violent extremism, including passing laws to expand and protect the right to vote.

“Congress needs to pass the For the People Act,” Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

The passage of the comprehensive electoral and ethics law is necessary to “counter the great white supremacy lie that led the uprising of the 6th Trump and other Republican officials that he lost the 2020 elections due to widespread electoral fraud. Democratic lawmakers from across the country are backing the For the People Act in Washington this week, calling on the Senate to pass the bill before it leaves town for the summer break.

A makeshift memorial in August 2019 for victims in front of the Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which was the site of a mass shooting. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)

Henderson was on the panel of witnesses that made recommendations to the Senate committee on how the federal government could address the threat of racially, ethnically, religiously, and politically motivated attacks by domestic extremists. Tuesday’s hearing, which coincided with the second anniversary of the mass shooting of 23 people in El Paso, Texas, was the first of two the committee plans to hold on the matter this week.

“In recent years, our nation has seen horrific acts of violence, such as the massacres of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and a mall in El Paso that targets Blacks, Jews and Latin Americans,” said the Democratic Senator Gary Peters, the chairman of the committee, in his opening address.

A Trump supporter carries a Confederate flag in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)

Peters said he feared these deadly attacks, along with the recent violence against the Asian-American community and the January 6th uprising in the US Capitol, “are a signal for something worse.”

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“If the federal government does not take swift action to address this escalating threat, I fear we will see more tragic attacks and more lives lost to domestic violent extremism,” he said.

A memorial near the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in Poway, California on April 28, 2019, the day after a gunman killed one person and injured three. (Sandy Huffaker / AFP via Getty Images)

Eric Fingerhut, President and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, echoed these concerns at the hearing, citing the “growing threat” of anti-Semitism in the United States in recent years.

Fingerhut called on Congress to increase funding for a federal grant program that would provide more security to nonprofit organizations – such as synagogues and religious schools or community centers – that are at high risk of attack, and urged Congress to select religious and other nonprofits as one of the critical infrastructure sectors in the country, which entitles them to additional security resources and a comprehensive risk management plan under the Department of Homeland Security.

An FBI agent outside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh following a fatal shooting in October 2018. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)

Paul Goldenberg, a senior fellow at Rutgers University and a former member of the Advisory Advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, agreed to Thimble’s request, saying the lack of adequate resources and coherent contingency planning to secure believing organizations “has definitely become an Achilles’ heel.” . “

“If our places of worship aren’t critical infrastructure, I’m not sure,” said Goldenberg.

In June, the Biden administration unveiled the US government’s first national strategy to counter the threat of domestic violent extremism, which Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has identified as “the main terrorist threat affecting the homeland.”

Peters pointed out that the committee plans to summon government witnesses after the August recess to testify what specifically they are doing to combat this threat.

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