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Terrorism

South Carolina church shooting should be called by its rightful name

Speaking on the “Today” show Friday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called the Wednesday killing of nine people in a Charleston church “an absolute hate crime.” It clearly was that, but why not be even more accurate and label it for what it was – terrorism.

American perception of the world, and the real threats it presents, will be more accurate and more correctly focused if we recognize that terrorists do not necessarily sport beards or pray toward Mecca. But that simple understanding is undermined by officially tolerating symbols of racism and terror. And refusing to call domestic acts of violence terrorism only reinforces that.

Dylann Storm Roof, 21, was arrested and charged with the nine killings. He has reportedly confessed and said that his goal was to ignite racial conflict. He has been photographed wearing the flags of former white supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia.

That last is telling. After the shootings, Haley ordered the U.S. and South Carolina flags flying above the State House in the capital, Columbia, lowered to half-staff out of respect. Nearby, however, the Confederate Battle Flag continues to fly – at full-staff – above a memorial to Confederate war dead.

It is an obscene contradiction, and an even more troubling statement. The Confederate Battle Flag is just that, the banner flown by rebels in combat against U.S. troops. (The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Texas could refuse to issue license plates featuring the Confederate flag.) However intended, defiantly flying the Battle Flag is an endorsement of treason and a war waged to preserve slavery.

In Haley’s defense, that flag is fixed so that it cannot be lowered. Nor does she have the authority even to try. According to The Washington Post, by South Carolina state law it can be taken down only on a two-thirds vote of the state Legislature. What kind of statement is that?

Some of this represents an ugly thread in American history. Tuskegee University says that over an 86-year period, 1882-1968, there were more than 4,700 lynchings in the United States. More than 3,400 of the victims – 73 percent – were black. That is more than died Sept. 11, 2001, or at Pearl Harbor.

On June 21, 1964, members of the Ku Klux Klan killed three civil-rights activists in Mississippi. The year before, Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls.

Of course, the insanity is not always tied to race. The 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people and wounded hundreds more. It was incoherently directed at “the government.”

And it is that sort of thing that increasingly worries police. Writing in The New York Times (June 16), Charles Jurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke report the results of a survey they conducted of 382 law-enforcement agencies. Seventy-four percent listed domestic anti-government terrorism as among their top-three concerns; 39 percent pointed to al-Qaida or the like. Only 3 percent said the threat from Muslim extremists was severe, while more than twice that – 7 percent – called the anti-government threat severe.

Jurzman and Schanzer say that since the Sept. 11 attacks, terrorist acts by American Muslims have “accounted for 50 fatalities.” Since 2000, right-wing extremists have killed 254 people, including 25 cops.

That threat assessment fits well with American history. The Sept. 11 attacks were terrible, but whether race-based or anti-government, most terrorist acts on American soil have been homegrown. And Dylann Storm Roof fits right in.



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