Loading ...Hate Crime? Or Terrorism?
Against the backdrop of rising worries about violent Muslim extremism in the United States, many see hypocrisy in the way that both the attack and the suspected attacker have been described.
While assaults like the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and the attempted shooting attack on an anti-Islam art exhibit in Garland, Tex., last month have been described as terrorism carried out by Islamic extremists, critics say that assaults against African-Americans and Muslim Americans are never called terrorism.
They also argue assailants who are white are far less likely to be described by law enforcement authorities as terrorists.
“We have been conditioned to accept that if the violence is committed by a Muslim, then it is terrorism,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group based in Washington.
“If the same violence is committed by a white supremacist or apartheid sympathizer and is not a Muslim, we start to look for excuses — he might be insane, maybe he was pushed too hard,” Mr. Awad said. “But the act fits perfectly the definition of terrorism.”
The range of voices making that point, or a version of it, has been growing throughout the day.
The hacker group Anonymous weighed in.
Source: www.nytimes.com