SILVER SPRING, MD. — A day after an anti-Semite allegedly shot and killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, experts disagreed about whether it was an isolated event or the latest sign of a growing threat by domestic hate groups.
The danger appeared to come from two directions: far-right fanatics who feed on domestic conspiracy theories and Muslim extremists who oppose U.S. policies abroad. Both have launched deadly attacks in recent weeks.
But the number of incidents and the death toll are lower than during the early 1980s and early 1990s, when white supremacists, armed militias and other extremist groups attacked government offices, law enforcement officers, banks and other targets.
Domestic terrorism peaked in April 1995, when militia movement sympathizer and Gulf War veteran Timothy J. McVeigh set off a truck bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding at least 800.
The resulting federal crackdown, which intensified after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda, pushed most domestic extremist groups into the shadows. Since that time, experts said, disturbed individuals have conducted mostly random and uncoordinated attacks.
"There's no indication there's an uptick in violence," said Leonard Zeskind, a researcher who has written extensively on white nationalist groups. "White nationalists periodically go out and shoot people. . . . As of yet, I'm not seeing anything new."
Incidents of violence against Jews have actually fallen in recent years.
The Anti-Defamation League reported June 1 that vandalism, harassment and assaults against Jewish people, property and community institutions had dropped for the fourth straight year.
The league counted 1,352 such incidents last year, including vandalism against the San Francisco Holocaust Memorial and the desecration of graves at a Jewish cemetery in Chicago. That's down from 1,821 incidents in 2004.
Other experts, however, see a mounting danger as the nation grapples with recession.
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., said the nonprofit group had tracked more than a 50% increase in what it considered right-wing hate groups over the last eight years -- to 926, from 602.
