It's Not a Hate Crime: It's Terrorism

There's a serious double standard. When Sunni and Shia Muslims kill people in mosques in Iraq we call it terrorism, but when white guys in America shoot a bunch of people in houses of worship we call it a "hate crime."

To wit: last night 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof shot and killed nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, SC. Roof has now reportedly been captured in North Carolina.

It's just another such incident in a long list of right-wing terrorist attacks:

In 2012, a white supremacist shot and killed six worshipers and wounded four others at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. A shooting rampage by a right-wing gunman in 2008 killed two people and wounded seven at a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee. 

The granddaddy of these terrorist attacks was the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when four black girls were killed. For good measure, let's not forget forget the right-wing terrorist bombings of the 1996 Olympics, abortion clinics and gay clubs, or the right-wing terrorist shootings of abortion providers, shall we?

Roof sat with the victims during prayer before opening fire. He said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Then he shot six women and three men, one of them a state senator. The shooter reportedly left one woman alive so that she could bear witness to the crime. Roof's Facebook page shows him wearing a jacket emblazoned with apartheid-era South African and Rhodesian flags.

It is clear that Roof committed these murders as a political statement in order to intimidate the African American community in the United States.

Now, there's a difference between a hate crime and terrorism. A hate crime is when a white guy beats up a black guy for dating a white woman, or a homophobe kills a gay man for hitting on him at a bar. The shooting in Charleston was a premeditated terrorist attack, calibrated to incite fear in all African Americans.

Attacks on churches aren't the only double standard on American right-wing terrorists. Police stations are frequently targets of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Less than a week ago an American gunman attacked Dallas police headquarters in an armored van. James Boulware planted a bunch of pipe bombs around the building. And the cops knew about this guy:

In 2013, Boulware was arrested after attacking a relative at their home and leaving the scene with "several firearms, ammo and body armor." Boulware then allegedly made phone calls in which he threatened to kill family members and attack churches or schools, which prompted the local school district to go into lockdown mode. He was arrested without incident and assault charges against him were eventually dropped.

Yes, the authorities just let him go, and let him buy more guns, an armored van, body armor, materiel for bombs and lots and lots of ammo.

But everyone's already forgotten about this guy, partly because he didn't kill anyone, but mostly because he was a white guy. And every time a white guy goes on a shooting spree everyone just says, "He was obviously unbalanced, maybe schizophrenic, just a deranged wacko with a fetish for guns and bombs."

They make excuses, such as, "Well, he wasn't connected to an organized terrorist group. He was just a lone-wolf nut job who hated the government." Which is usually followed by the sentiment, "They drove him to it!"

And this is the difference: whites are held individually responsible for their crimes (usually with a large dollop of blame attached to society for making them do it), but the entire African-American and Muslim communities are held collectively responsible for any crime committed by one of their own.

Boulware's attack was clearly terrorism, a political statement intended to intimidate the police and retaliate against the justice system which he blamed for his miserable life.

Was Boulware schizophrenic and crazy? Quite possibly. Almost by definition suicide bombers are mentally ill. It doesn't matter. That's why the word "terrorist" is so frequently preceded by "crazed." If they commit terrorist acts, they're terrorists, regardless of their mental health.

Boulware and Roof aren't alone. There are lots of people just as crazy as they are. The Department of Homeland Security reports that right-wing terrorism is a greater threat than Muslim extremism. These guys aren't just lone wolves: they roam this country in packs:

Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism. Perhaps 100,000 people form a core of the movement, he said.

The right-wing sovereign citizen groups claim the police have no authority over them, and have killed lots of cops to make the point.

These guys have been skulking in the background for decades, spinning conspiracy theories, setting up their militias, killing cops over pizza, evading grazing fees in Nevada, and occasionally blowing up federal buildings in Oklahoma City.

Are they crazy? Sure. Why not. It doesn't matter. Their victims are just as dead.

Fox News and conservative politicians encourage these kooks and feed their paranoia with their crypto-racist, anti-government, hate-filled rhetoric. And then Republicans bow down to the NRA to enable them to buy guns, ammo, body armor and armored vehicles on demand.

These right-wing terrorists will keep on shooting cops and innocent church-going Christian African Americans as long as the right gives them the license to kill.