When this whole coronavirus thing stated to blow up, I led off my this-week-in-terrorism post with a quick look at how some terrorist groups were responding to the pandemic. Here we are, only two weeks later, and it’s time for an update.

Noted terrorism scholar Mia Bloom has an insightful essay at the website Just Security where she shows how the wide spectrum of violent extremist groups, from the American far right to jihadists like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban are either seeking to take advantage of the pandemic or working it into their existing worldview:

Into this public health crisis step extremist groups, which may even take credit for events for which they are not responsible. Their instinct to capitalize on people’s misery and suffering is consistent across the ideological spectrum, from right-wing extremists to violent jihadists. That instinct is on full display right now, as the world reels from COVID-19’s rapid spread and the accompanying disinformation. White supremacist groups are touting crackpot accelerationist, siege, and Great Replacement theories during the COVID-19 pandemic to motivate individuals to take action against the New World Order, Agenda 21, George Soros, the Chinese government, and others they perceive as seeking to eliminate the white race.

Amidst a global pandemic, the country’s leading ISIS propaganda analyst, Laith al-Khouri, says the jihadists’ main objective is to sow the seeds of mistrust of government—including by spreading disinformation and malign information —while simultaneously using unfolding events to substantiate their view of the world and validate their predictions. Jihadists will showcase governments as having lied to the public about infection numbers. In further undermining the credibility of governments, who are knowingly suppressing information about the virus (such as Iran, Egypt, and Turkey), jihadists can use this opportunity to recruit new followers who perceive the terrorist groups as more capable or more honest than their own governments.

The virus has been a source of renewed inspiration for terrorist groups who see it as a sign from God and repudiation of secular States that have mismanaged the crisis. Al-Qaeda released a statement on March 31, in which they accused Western governments of ignoring their citizens’ health “instead of ensuring the provision of health facilities and medical supplies they [remain] obsessed with the tools of war and human eradication.” Several jihadist groups, such as the Taliban, declared that coronavirus “is a disease ordained by the Almighty Allah which has perhaps been sent by Allah because of the disobedience and sins of mankind or other reasons.”

The whole article is well worth your time. Meanwhile, The Guardian yesterday had a story about how one particular slice of the American neo-Nazi far right, so-called “accelerationists,” is hoping to exploit the coronavirus crisis to speed the collapse of society:

The watchdog group the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) raised the alarm last week about opportunism from far-right so-called “accelerationist” groups who believe sowing chaos and violence will hasten the collapse of society, allowing them to build a white supremacist one in its place.

Late last month, the FBI warned such extremist groups were encouraging members to deliberately spread the virus to Jewish people and police officers. Similarly, British hate monitors Hope Not Hate warned these groups are expressing “gleeful expectation of social turmoil”.

With few public-facing social media services allowing white supremacists to have a reliable platform for their views, the propaganda effort to use the coronavirus crisis as a recruiting tool is mainly visible on laissez-faire social media platforms like Telegram.

There neo-Nazi groups have been affirming and welcoming the pandemic as a threat to liberal democracy and seeing it as an opportunity to grow their movement and realize their goals with acts of violence.

The deeper this crisis goes, the more I expect we’ll see further signs that such groups will seek to leverage the pandemic to advance their political, social, or religious agendas. Now on to this week’s look back at the week in terrorism history.

• April 6, 2001 — Los Angeles: Algerian citizen Ahmed Ressam is convicted of a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Years Eve 1999. Ressam, an al-Qadea operative who had received instruction at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, was arrested on Dec. 14, 1999 as he attempted to enter the United States from British Columbia driving a rented car in which he had hidden explosives and bomb components.
• April 10, 2003 — Noonday, Texas: The FBI raids the home of William Krar and storage facilities that Krar rented in the area, discovering an arsenal that includes more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and remote-control briefcase bombs, and almost two pounds of deadly sodium cyanide. Also found are components to convert the cyanide into a bomb capable of killing thousands, along with white supremacist and antigovernment material. 
• April 10, 2015 — Signal Mountain, TN: Robert Doggart, 63, is arrested in connection with a plot to kill residents and destroy the school and mosque of Islamberg, a predominantly African-American Muslim hamlet in Hancock, N.Y. Doggart, who claims to be an ordained Christian minister in the Christian National Church, was also a 2014 congressional candidate who ran and lost as an independent in east Tennessee.
• April 11, 1968 — Syria: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, is formed. The PFLP-GC was created after a faction led by Ahmed Jibril split from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, claiming the parent organization was insufficiently militant and was drifting too far in the direction of revolutionary Marxism.