![]() In 2016 Trump opined on CNN “I think Islam hates us” and he has repeatedly condemned “radical Islamic terrorism,” but he has been noticeably silent about the actions and beliefs of the white nationalists and alt-right militants of the kind that rallied in Charlottesville on Saturday. Trump said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On Saturday President Donald Trump condemned the attack in Charlottesville in general terms, but didn’t specifically call out the white nationalists who had convened the rally and who are responsible for the death and injuries that occurred there. Jihadist terrorists have used vehicles as weapons frequently, for instance, in recent months in London killing 13 in two separate incidents and in 2016 in Nice, France, killing 84, and in Berlin killing 12. The attack in Charlottesville deploying a car as a weapon is a new twist for right-wing terrorists in the United States. These terrorist attacks by right-wing, left-wing and black nationalist terrorists remind us that terrorism is not only the preserve of those who are motivated by the ideology of Osama bin Laden and ISIS. In January a security guard was killed in Denver by a terrorist who appears to have been motivated by jihadist beliefs. Luckily, nobody was hurt in that attack.Īnd jihadist terrorists continue to kill Americans. In December a man shot a weapon inside a pizzeria in Washington because he believed a conspiracy theory that the pizza joint was in fact a secret front for a child sex ring run by senior Democratic Party officials. Black nationalist terrorists have killed 8 people in the United States since 2016, while in June a terrorist motivated by extremist anti-Trump views shot at a Republican congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, critically wounding Rep. Other forms of political violence have also emerged in the past couple of years. ![]() New America, a non-partisan think tank that tracks political violence, finds that jihadist terrorists have killed 95 people in the United States since al Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11, while the attack in Charlottesville brings the number to 68 people that have been killed by far-right terrorists in the States during the same time period. Political violence in the United States takes all shapes and forms and on Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, we saw one of its manifestations, militant right-wing terrorism. If James Alex Fields Jr., of Maumee, Ohio, indeed intended to harm the counter-protesters, then his act deserves to be branded domestic terrorism. On Saturday, a 20-year-old man from Ohio allegedly rammed his car into a group of people gathered to protest a white nationalist rally, killing a 32-year old woman and injuring 19 others.
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