Call it what it is!

Just over a week ago, John T. Earnest, 19, entered the Chabad of Poway synagogue, near San Diego, firing an AR-15 style rifle, wounding Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein – the founding rabbi of the congregation – and killing 60-year-old Lori Gilbert-Kaye, who jumped in front of Goldstein to protect him.

Bullet fragments also disfigured an eight-year-old child, yet despite the fact that approximately 100 people were inside the synagogue at the time of this attack, the Press has consistently refused to call this horror by its true name – domestic terrorism.

Could it be because John Earnest was white? Might it be due to the fact that as a society we have trained ourselves to believe that terrorists only come from those skin types of a darker hue?

One would think the media would wise up that right-wing purveyors of hate can transform young men into welders of Kalashnikovs and bombs as easily as a Middle Eastern terrorist cell. After all, the Poway shooting comes six weeks after a Caucasian gunman killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Six months ago, an avowed white nationalist killed 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. A white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, killed nine Black parishioners in 2015. And, of course, a Caucasian subscriber of Internet hate groups, an adherent of “Black Metal,” followed that advice most recently here in Louisiana and burnt down three historic African-American churches in St. Landry Parish.

Nevertheless, when logic suggests a rising tide white supremacist terrorism driven by a radical ideology, our punditti continue to call these terror attacks “isolated incidents,” and the grand orange talking-head himself leads the way in discounting any evidence of a widescale radical movement manifesting a terrorist birth.

After all, when in 2017, a white supremacist murdered a counterprotester in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a white nationalist rally there turned violent, President Trump said after there were “very fine people” on both sides. The day before the synagogue shooting, he defended those remarks.

No wonder none dare call it ‘White Terrorism.’

This article originally published in the May 6, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.