When Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) labeled cattle rancher and right-wing extremist Cliven Bundy a ‘domestic terrorist,” the far Right went into an apoplectic state. But the Senate majority leader may have unwittingly stumbled upon an interesting and sobering fact: that when it comes to domestic terrorism, you are far more likely to be murdered by a far Right-wing American than a Muslim American, but the term ‘terrorist” remains reserved exclusively for acts of political violence carried out by Muslims.

If terrorism is defined as violence against innocent civilians designed to advance a political cause, then all racist murders that occur in the U.S. are also acts of terrorism, because the perpetrators commit the violent act to send a political message to minority communities (i.e. intimidate them into a subordinate status.)

Arun Kundani, adjunct professor at New York University and author of The Muslims are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the War on Terror, writes: ‘The definition of terrorism is never applied consistently, because to do so would mean the condemnatory power of the term would have to be applied to our violence as much as theirs, thereby defeating the word’s usefulness.”

Violence carried out by far Right groups or individuals, which have racism as […]