"Jewish security experts call for 9/11-style response to fight white supremacists"

After a white supremacist gunman murdered 22 people in El Paso, Jewish groups that track hate say now is the time to get serious about the threat from the far-right.

In fact, Jewish security officials say, the crisis calls for the kind of response that followed 9/11 — building a system to track white supremacists from scratch. Since the 2001 attacks, white supremacists have been responsible for a far greater number of killings in the US than international terrorists...

“We need a wholesale rethink, in terms of our domestic security posture, to address violent extremism and bias crimes,” said George Selim, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security who is now the ADL’s senior vice president for programs...

“In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” Trump said at the White House on Monday. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.”

It might not be enough, Jewish security officials say in dealing with white supremacists, and hearken back to what happened after 9/11...

“We need to harness some of that same energy that we as a country demonstrated 18 years ago to face this new threat and provide law enforcement with what they need to confront a threat that number for number has been more deadly than foreign terrorist organizations,” said Michael Masters, who directs the Secure Community Network, the security arm of national Jewish organizations.

The 9/11 attacks led to a spate of efforts to track international terror: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security; the enactment of the Patriot Act; the enhanced targeting of the financial networks that fund terrorists.

”We do not have the necessary tools,” said Masters, a former senior official at the Cook County, Illinois, DHS. “Law enforcement can’t take advantage of the same tools to address terrorism as they can international terrorism.”

Michael German, a former FBI agent who infiltrated white supremacist groups, said Homeland Security is ill equipped to address the threat. That’s both because of Trump administration disinterest, he said, and because DHS concentrates on tracking publicly available intelligence sources rather than focused investigations.