President Donald Trump is angry because he believes the media is ignoring terrorism. "Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our homeland, as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino and all across Europe," Trump declared at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. "It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported, and in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it."
A list, released by the White House on Monday, contains 78 attacks carried out by "radical Islamic terrorists" since 2014. Those attacks were mostly "underreported," following the president's own claim earlier in the day that the media conspired to ignore such attacks. Trump has been almost entirely silent about terror plotted and carried out by white supremacists and other far-right extremists, as Mark Follman wrote for Mother Jones.
Trump claims that the media is ignoring terrorism and that is one of the reasons for releasing this list which, by the way, contains terror attacks adequately covered by media. On the White House list was terrorist attack that was covered widely by both the U.S. and foreign media — the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which killed 14 people.
On the other hand, attacks committed by non-Muslims have been omitted from the list. For example, Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist, and a church-going Christian, killed nine people at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston in June 2015. A mass shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in November 2015 committed by Robert Dear, an anti-abortion Christian terrorist, is also missing from the list.
It’s the one thing if someone supports the fight against terrorism in every sense of the word, but one shouldn’t be less guilty only because he is a Christian. It could be dangerous and it is discriminatory as well. There is a very strange selection of attacks in the list because it includes only Muslim terrorists and terror attacks are certainly not carried out only by Muslims. But also there seems little reason to expect a list of attacks on Muslims, Jews, African Americans and others from the president anytime soon.
Photo Credits: Patheos
