Hate crime? Many calling it terrorism

T he massacre of nine A frican-A mericans in Charleston has been classified as a possible hate crime,with the accused being a 21-year-old white man who once wore an apartheid badge and other symbols of white supremacy.

B ut many civil rights advocates are asking why the attack has not officially been called terrorism.

A gainst the backdrop of rising worries about violent M uslim extremism in the United States,advocates see hypocrisy in the way the attack and the man under arrest in the shooting have been described by law enforcement officials and the news media.

While assaults like the B oston M arathon bombing in 2013and the attack on an anti-Islamic gathering in G arland,T exas,last month have been widely portrayed as acts of terrorism carried out by Islamic extremists,critics say that assaults against A frican-A mericans and M uslim A mericans are rarely if ever called terrorism.

M oreover,they argue, assailants who are white are far less likely to be described by the authorities as terrorists.

“We have been conditioned to accept that if the violence is committed by a M uslim,then it is terrorism,” Nihad A wad,executive director of the Council on A merican-Islamic R elations,a civil rights advocacy group in Washington,said in a telephone interview.

“If the same violence is committed by a white supremacist or apartheid sympathizer and is not a M uslim,we start to look for excuses — he might be insane,maybe he was pushed too hard,” A wad said.

D ean O beidallah,a M uslim-A merican radio show host and commentator,said it should be obvious that the Charleston killer was a terrorist.

“We have a man who intentionally went to a black church,had animus toward black people and assassinated an elected official and eight other people,” he said.“It seems he was motivated by a desire to terrorize and kill black people.”

While A ttorney G eneral Loretta E.Lynch and South Carolina officials said the shooting on Wednesday night was under investigation as a hate crime,much of the reaction on social media was caustic,with commentators saying they saw a double standard in such terminology.

“A white supremacist massacres 9 black people in Charleston.It is a hate crime it is terrorism, it is A merica 2015,” R emi K anazi,a PalestinianA merican activist and poet,said on T witter.

Samuel Sinyangwe, a civil rights activist who has helped chronicle violence against A frican-A mericans,wrote: “#CharlestonShooting terrorist wore an A partheid flag on his jacket.If a M uslim man wore an ISIS flag, he wouldn’t get past mall security.”

T he definition of terrorism is a shifting and contentious subject,usually with political overtones.T he antagonists in the Syrian war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example,routinely accuse each other of terrorism.