Not All Terrorists Are Muslims: As the Past Week Should Remind Us, Political Violence Is Not Restricted by Race, Religion or Ideology

Albert Ford was quoted in Salon about the many different forms of terrorist attacks:

“When you ask the average American what his or her interpretation of terrorism is, it’s probably not a guy in Colorado shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic,” said Albert Ford, a program associate at the International Security and Fellows programs at New America, over the phone. “It’s going to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planning the bombing on 9/11.”

That’s a problem because, as Ford and his team found earlier this year in a report on terrorism in the United States after 9/11, other forms of terrorism besides the jihadist-initiated kind are common and deadly. Until last year when Omar Mateen killed dozens of people in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub while spouting garbled messages about ISIS and al-Qaida, right-wing terrorists had killed more people in the U.S. since 2001 than Islamic terrorists.

“Terrorism is deadly across the political spectrum, regardless of ideology,” Ford said.