Peter Beinart observes that the national conversation would be much different if Jared Lee Loughner were a Muslim:
Had the shooters' name been Abdul Mohammed, you'd be hearing the familiar drumbeat about the need for profiling and the pathologies of Islam. But since his name was Jared Lee Loughner, he gets called “mentally unstable”; the word “terrorist” rarely comes up. When are we going to acknowledge that good old-fashioned white Americans are every bit as capable of killing civilians for a political cause as people with brown skin who pray to Allah?
I'll just add that we have every reason to believe that "good old-fashioned white Americans" are capable of killing civilians for a political cause. The deadliest terrorist attack on American soil -- before 9/11 -- was the Oklahoma City Bombing, which killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others. Abortion clinic bombings were relatively common throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and the Centennial Olympic Park bombing -- committed by Eric Robert Rudolph at the 1996 Summer Olympics -- killed two people and injured 111 others. And of course, if we go back a little further, we find that the principle perpetrators of terrorism on American soil were white supremacists, by way of the Ku Klux Klan and other such organizations.
The "white supremacist/right-wing extremist" was a common trope in movies and television during the 1990s -- see: The West Wing, Season 1 for one example -- but after 9/11, we basically forgot this as a culture. Jared Loughner was not out to accomplish a particular political agenda, as far as we can tell. Still, Beinart is right, we should remember that "terrorism" isn't exclusive to Muslims.
-- Jamelle Bouie
