Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) continued to hit white nationalism hard this week by making a great point about how white nationalist violence isn’t classified as terrorism.
The House Oversight Committee heard testimony on white nationalism and terrorism on Thursday, and as usual, Ocasio-Corez was there to ask really good questions and offer spot-on analysis.
Ocasio-Cortez noted that the San Bernardino and Pulse night club mass shootings in 2015 and 2016 were labeled as acts of domestic terrorism while white supremacist Dylann Roof’s mass killing of several parishioners at a historic black church in South Carolina was not labeled the same way.
Anti-Defamation League Senior VP George Selim told the freshman congresswoman that Roof’s act of white nationalist violence should have been classified as domestic terrorism.
Ocasio-Cortez also observed that the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 by a white supremacist was also not labeled as an act of domestic terrorism, and Selim responded that while former Attorney General Jeff Sessions called it such, domestic terrorism charges were not brought by prosecutors.
The difference between the white supremacist shooters and the other two shooters is their identity. The other shooters had brown skin and were Muslims.
“I could not help but feel and see that attacks committed by Muslim Americans were almost automatically labeled as domestic terrorist incidents,” she concluded. “Yet white supremacist shooting after shooting after shooting is not and I cannot help but come to the conclusion that these labels, what’s being labeled as terrorism, is almost exclusively coming down to the identity, and it seems as though white men invoking white supremacy and engaging in mass shootings are almost immune from being labeled domestic terrorists in their violence.”
Here’s the video via Twitter.
.@AOC made a great point about white supremacist violence and the label of terrorism pic.twitter.com/kc4bpr1MRN
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) May 16, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez would go on to air more of thoughts on Twitter Saturday.
When a mass shooting is committed by a Muslim, the crime is almost automatically labeled as Domestic Terrorism.
But when White Supremacists like Dylann Roof shot up a black church, or attack the Tree of Life Synagogue, the FBI declined to charge them w/ Domestic Terrorism.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 18, 2019
White Supremacists get charged w hate crimes. Muslims get charged w terrorism.
This is a HUGE difference. Hate crimes are underreported, deprioritized, + aren’t treated as seriously as domestic terror charges.
Yet in the US, Neo-Nazi violence far outnumbers Islamic extremism.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 18, 2019
It’s time for the Justice Department to stop coddling white nationalists and treat them as the terrorists they are. They are a rising threat in our nation and around the world and represent more of a risk than Muslim extremists because they are already embedded among us and in our own military waiting to strike.
We need a president who takes this threat seriously and a Justice Department that will not show any tolerance just because the perpetrator is a white Christian male.
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