In the name of Allah, the Merciful to all, the Compassionate

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when most people in the United States hear the word “terrorism”, they think of Muslims. But terrorism comes in many forms. For example, the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) includes the attack by Frazier Glenn Miller, a white supremacist and former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, on a synagogue in Overland Park, Kan.; Robert Dear’s attack on Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs; and Wade Michael Page’s attack on a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, along with many other lesser-known attacks.

In a recent study, researchers of Georgia State University found that the news media do not cover all terrorist attacks the same way. Rather, they give drastically more coverage to attacks by Muslims, particularly foreign-born Muslims – even though those are far less common than other kinds of terrorist attacks. In total, there were 89 attacks committed by different perpetrators in the United States during the five-year period they examined. Between 2011 and 2015 in the United States, Muslims perpetrated 12.4 percent of those attacks.

In the name of Allah, the Merciful to all, the Compassionate

Undoubtedly, you have come across the stories of many american journalists who interview political figures in other countries. One of the techniques commonly used by these journalists in order to gain the moral upper ground is to name several journalist and/or activists murdered in those countries. Then when they are told that such things happen in every country, they simply ask their interviewee to name a few of them who were murdered in the states. Usually that trick works and the interviewee cannot remember any of them offhand. In reality, it’s not that no activist or whistle-blower gets murdered in the U.S., rather, in the U.S. they carry out such tasks in a more professional and more elegant way.