TEHRAN (Iran News) –Multiple issues plaguing the United States that could trigger violence on a wider scale have been reflected in new research which found that half of Americans believe a “civil war” will take place “in the next few years.”

Researchers from the University of California-Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and the California Violence Research Center have revealed that 50.1 percent of respondents to their survey are of the view that a civil war will occur soon.

According to the developers of the 2022 Life in America survey, 47.8 percent of respondents said they do not believe in the potentially violent scenario unfolding in the U.S.

The shocking number indicating half of Americans believe in a civil war over the next couple of years, will be of grave concern to American officials who have already witnessed the deadly insurrection at the heart of U.S. government and politics in Capitol Hill, Washington DC after protesters raided Congress.

Around 14 percent of those surveyed responded that they “strongly” or “very strongly” believe a civil war is imminent in their country, while 36 percent said they somewhat agree.

The research comes as the House select committee investigating the January 6 2021 insurrection by supporters of ex-President Trump held its final hearing of the summer on Thursday. The insurrection left five people dead, including a police officer, and more than 100 officers injured.

Trump watched the violence on television in his White House dining room and failed to take “immediate action in a time of crisis”, the investigation has heard. The committee has been told the former president was aiming to stop or delay the congressional certification of Biden’s election victory by not intervening.

The committee will reportedly publish its report on what led to the attack on Capital Hill, including the possibility of recommending charges against individuals involved, later this year.

The former U.S. President has regularly insisted that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and stolen from him. He has engaged in efforts to overturn the results of the vote at the state and federal levels.

He still maintains widespread support with a recent survey indicating the ex-President would defeat Biden if an election was held today.

The researchers cited five recent domestic issues in the United States as of late that “motivated” the study for the potential outbreak of even greater violence and unrest.

They firstly stated what the study views as a striking rise in violence, especially in firearm violence. From 2019 to 2020, the country witnessed an increase in homicide by 28 percent which was the largest single-year percentage increase ever recorded, according to the researchers.

Among all the violent killings that were officially registered in the year 2019, guns were used in 57.7 percent and that number increased to 62.1 percent in 2020, when 78.9 percent of homicides (19,995 of 25,356) and 52.8 percent of suicides (24,292 of 45,979) involved the use of guns.

The second factor the researchers took into consideration was the related issue of an unprecedented increase in firearm purchases. This huge rise, that grabbed the headlines, began with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020 and (except for a brief respite late in 2021), has continued through to June 2022.

From January 2020 through June 2022, background checks on firearm purchasers have averaged 46.6 percent above expected levels the research says, which it found to be an estimated 14.5 million extra background checks that have been conducted, of 45.7 million checks altogether.

That’s a lot of guns currently on the streets of the U.S. and certainly enough ammunition to wage a deadly civil war. The figure is potentially much larger as the number of firearms purchased on the black market is believed to be very high yet the exact amount is unknown, which makes the news all the scarier.

The third issue that researchers touched on is the growing uncertainty about the stability and value of democracy in the United States.
According to a Yahoo News-YouGov poll last month, about half of all Americans believed the United States might “cease to be a democracy in the future,”

There are many experts who argue the U.S. is not a democracy in the first place. Nevertheless, most Americans across the political spectrum are said to now perceive a serious threat to “democracy” in the U.S.

More than two-thirds of respondents perceived “a serious threat to our democracy,” and 88.8 percent believed it is very or extremely important “for the United States to remain a democracy” But at the same time, 42.4 percent agreed with the statement that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy”; 19.0 percent agreed strongly or very strongly to the latter.

At the same time, nearly 70 percent of adults, with very similar results for both parties that dominate U.S. politics – the Democrat and the Republican Party – agree that “American democracy only serves the interests of the wealthy and powerful.”

This is while around 20 percent of Republicans, conservatives, and voters for former U.S. President Donald Trump (and nine percent of Democrats, liberals, and voters for current President Joe Biden) disagree with the statement that “democracy is [the] best form of government.”

The fourth factor the researchers focused on was the increase in American “public opinion of extreme, false beliefs about American society.” Approximately one adult in five endorses the core beliefs of the Q-Anon ideology that “government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles” and (22 percent) that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders”

This is while nearly one adult in three (32 percent), the research cites, endorses the assertion that “a group of people in this country [is] trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants.”

The fifth factor was the growing support among Americans for the use of violence to achieve political or social goals.

More than a third (36 percent) of American adults (56 percent of Republicans and 22 percent of Democrats) agree that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Nearly one-fifth of adults (18 percent) agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

The current research nationwide on the frequency and deciding factor on support for political violence in the U.S. is quite limited the study says. It cites the existing research that has been criticized on multiple grounds, which includes failures to define violence, to determine whether support for political violence reflects support for violence generally, and to determine whether those who endorse political violence are willing to engage in such violence themselves.

It states that there are many important and urgent questions that remain “insufficiently explored”, or unexplored altogether. And poses several important questions, such as how prevalent are support for, and willingness to engage in, political violence when that term is defined?

“The motivating premises for this survey were that current conditions in the U.S. create both perceived threats and actual threats to its future as a free and democratic society,” the researchers for the study wrote. “The findings bear out both premises.”

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As the Israeli army continues to pound residential areas in Gaza with air raids and artillery shells, far-right Israeli extremists step up their brutal campaign of lynching Palestinian Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship, thereby shattering oft-repeated Israeli propaganda that Israel is a democracy where all minorities enjoy human rights.

Over the past few days, with the outbreak of the ongoing flare-up between Gaza and Israel, several Palestinians were killed or severely injured by far-right Israeli gangs who called for slaughtering Palestinians. One of the most heart-breaking cases of harassment against Palestinians happened near Tel Aviv when a group of Jewish zealots attacked a man they believed to be an Arab.

Footage of the incident was aired on television Wednesday night. The shocking images show a man being forcibly removed from his car and beaten by a crowd of dozens until he lost consciousness, AFP reported, adding that the attack, broadcast by public broadcaster Kan, took place on the seafront promenade of Bat Yam, south of Israel’s commercial capital Tel Aviv.

“The victim of the lynching is seriously injured but stable,” Tel Aviv’s Ichilov hospital said in a statement, without revealing his identity.
In addition, Israeli terrorists smashed shops owned by Palestinians in the Green Line zone, a demarcation line separating Palestinian territories occupied in 1948 and those occupied in 1967.

The Associated Press reported that a group of black-clad Israelis smashed the windows of an Arab-owned ice cream shop in Bat Yam and ultranationalists could be seen chanting, “Death to Arabs!” on live television.

This hatred against an ethnic group that is supposed to be part of the Israeli people resulted in the killing by Jewish extremists of an Arab man in Lod, a city with both Jewish and Arab residents about 15 miles south of Tel Aviv. During a funeral for this man, angry protestors clashed with security forces. The deceased man died after Jewish extremists pelted his car with stones, prompting the so-called Israeli Arabs to hit back.

Yair Revivo, the mayor of Lod, described what happened in Lod as “civil war,” calling for the Israeli army to suppress Arabs. “An intifada [uprising] erupted in Lod, you have to bring in the army,” he said. The drama also involved the use of emergency powers by Israel over an Arab community for the first time since 1966.

The Lod outburst of anger revealed deeper grievances among the Arab community, which have long been buried deep under the Israeli propaganda about co-existence, according to Arab activists in Lod.

Ghassan Munayyer, a Lod-based activist, said the veneer of coexistence conceals deeper disparities, including in housing and infrastructure, comparing its Arab neighborhoods to “refugee camps,” according to the Associated Press.

“The Jews love saying there’s coexistence. They go out to eat in an Arab restaurant and they call it coexistence,” he said. “But they don’t see Arabs as equal human beings who have rights that they have to respect.”

The outbreak of communal clashes inside Israel caused Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to warn of civil war after the decades-long, pent-up frustrations among Israeli Arabs broke out in the way of clashes with security forces.

Rivlin, who failed to denounce his regime’s excessive use of violence against Palestinians, described the rioting in several Israeli cities as “senseless civil war.”

Israeli politicians have sought to put an end to this war by assuaging concerns over domestic extremism. But the war is unlikely to end anytime soon so long as Israel cold-bloodedly kills defenseless children and women in Gaza and desecrates places of sanctity for Muslims in Jerusalem (al-Quds) especially the al-Aqsa Mosque, which stands as the first Qiblah (direction of prayer) and the third-holiest site in Islam.

As Israel continues to cry foul at the rockets coming from the beleaguered Gaza, it’s worth noting that the latest round of violence began after Israel moved to evict Palestinian families from their ancestral homes in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, something that left the Palestinians with no option but to hit back.

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