Growing up, we were told that if a bird walked like a duck, quacked like a duck, then it was a duck. However, even in this age of technological advancement when almost every human being owns a smartphone, camera, or TV, people can be tricked into not believing what they see or hear with their own eyes and ears.
So why aren’t “white men” who are found with weapons of mass destruction or found guilty of mass slaughter labeled as terrorists as readily as a man of any color with a Muslim name or affiliated with a Muslim community/group even of lesser crimes? Conditioning!
That we even ask the question is the result of decades of western conditioning — Islamophobic propaganda and misinformation. Law and judicial enforcements say it’s the way the law is written (it inevitably leads to racial and religious profiling). But who wrote the law? And when it is hard to overlook the truth that maybe white men can’t jump, but they do commit acts of terrorism, they want to come up with a bandage like “terrorism enhancements”, which only labels the unavoidable white male criminal terrorists – after the fact.
Whenever there is a terrorist act, two fears arise. The first fear is from non-Muslims who assume that it is a Muslim/Islamic affiliate and they dig for the connection. Or the second fear is from within the Muslim communities who sit in fearful prayer that the actor is not an Abdullah or a Muhammad. The “conditioning” is to go to the Islamic premise first, until proven not the case.
“Acts of terrorism are inherently political, and so are the responses to them,” says Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. Kundnani further states, “We don’t have a consistent definition of what gets called terrorism and what doesn’t. And if we did have a consistent definition, it would be something like, ‘acts of violence carried out for political purposes against civilians’, which is what you’d see in the dictionary. If we use that term, then of course a lot of other things that we don’t call terrorism would be called terrorism, right?”
According to a report by the Anti-Defamation League given to CNN, last year whites were responsible for the majority of killings in the U.S. Extreme ideology that perpetuates hatred and violence should be defined as terrorism. Rightfully so, it would include white nationalists, white supremacists, right-wing extremists, neo-Nazis, KKK, and others that would change the dynamics of western thought about terrorism, not limiting the ability of adding only foreign labels to terrorist perpetrators capable of the evolution of their own domestic ideologies.
Going this route would bring relief to such Muslim communities as The Muslims of America, Inc. (TMOA), who recently saw the prosecution of Robert R. Doggart, a Tennessee politician, who was indicted for plotting to destroy the upstate New York Islamic village and kill the Muslim inhabitants. Though not originally charged with terrorism, a terrorist enhancement was added at the time of sentencing.
The community has been plagued for years by Islamophobic propagandists; whose lies they believe brought Doggart and others to their doorsteps. Like other Muslim communities in the U.S., TMOA finds these times tense, especially when “terrorists” are found in their neighborhood. Recently Nathan Grover, of New Milford, PA was arrested on charges of possession/manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, drug and paraphernalia possession, and prohibited offensive weapons. Also in 2017, a Warminster, PA man, David Jasiulewicz was charged with possession/manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. Neither of these men have to date been charged with terrorism, but their proximity to Islamberg, raises the eyebrows of its citizenry.
