Kevin Gray talking:
most people would say a crime like this, you’re trying to terrorize people. But when we start talking about the so-called expansion of the war on terrorism and expansion of the use of that word, and especially when, in a post-9/11 world, it has meant denying due process rights to a whole lot of people—Dylann Roof was a human drone. And every Tuesday morning, the Obama administration uses drones to kill people whose names we don’t even know and can’t pronounce. So, I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the idea of expanding this word “terror.”
Let’s convict this young man or try this young man for murder, nine counts of murder. I am opposed to the death penalty. I would like to see him go to jail with life without parole. But, you know, the law—when you start using terms like “terrorism” in this country, for me, it’s always had a racial tinge to it going into it. So that’s problematic. And it’s been an expansion of the denial of due process with the use of the term. So I’m a little troubled by it. I just—you know, I believe that there ought to be a standard of law, one standard law.
Richard Cohen talking:
I do think it is a classic case of terrorism. It’s politically motivated violence by a non-state actor and carried out with the intention of intimidating more persons than those who are the immediate victims. And I think in some ways it’s important to talk about it as—and terrorism in that way, not so we can send out drones, not so we can deny people their due process rights, but so we can understand the true dimensions of what we’re facing. We’re not facing just kind of the lone nut who walks in some place and kills a bunch of people. We’re talking about someone who sees himself as part of a larger movement, intended to, you know, deny all black people their rights. So I think there is some consequence in thinking about it that way.
Juan Cole recently tweeted that since 2002 right-wing white terrorists have killed more Americans than Muslim extremists.
the number of organized white supremacist groups has fallen fairly significantly over the last few years. But I don’t think that means that the level of white supremacist activity has fallen. We still see a high level of violence. And what we’re seeing is people drifting away from the organized groups, you know, and retreating to the anonymity of the net. You know, there’s a website out there called Stormfront. Right now it has 300,000 registered users. Those are people who have signed up to post their hatred. And that’s an increase of about 50 percent over the last five years.
After 9/11, we saw all of the resources at the federal level go towards jihadi terror, and, you know, kind of ignoring our homegrown terrorism. That began to change last year somewhat after the killings in [Overland] Park, Arkansas, by a well-known white supremacist. But I still think it’s really important for the government, at all levels, not to put all of their eggs in the jihadi basket and to recognize that we have as much, or if not more, to fear by what we call sometimes homegrown terrorists.
— source democracynow.org
Kevin Alexander Gray, civil rights activist and community organizer in Columbia, South Carolina. He edited the book Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence and is the author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics.
Richard Cohen, is the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. He is co-author of an editorial published today in The New York Times titled “White Supremacists Without Borders.”