‘Lone Wolf,’ ‘Self-Radicalized': Islamophobic Buzzwords never applied to White Terrorists

Juan Coles writes that ‘Lone Wolf,’ ‘Self-Radicalized': Islamophobic Buzzwords never applied to White Terrorists.

“Terrorism” has been racialized in the American press and law enforcement community, marked as having to do with Muslims but almost never used to refer to people of northern European background. A few years ago, when a police spokesman said that “We have concluded that event was not terrorism,” likely what he meant is that no Muslims were involved or that no cell or organization was.

Racializing dissent has an old genealogy in American politics. In the early twentieth century, Jewish-American immigrants were suspected of socialism and Italian-Americans of anarchism. In the Red Scare of 1917-1920, workers who joined labor actions were falsely accused of Communism and were targeted for mob violence, especially if they had “foreign names.” African-Americans who had come north to work in factories during the war, filling a domestic labor shortage, were likewise tagged as subversive. Somehow persons of English ancestry with names like Worthington — even if they were blue collar workers– were not assumed to be Communists or foreign agents or radicals. Russian-Americans were deported. In Illinois after the war, a mob attacked Italian-Americans and razed their homes.

Today it is Muslim-Americans who have been stereotyped as radicals, although the vast majority of them are actually pillars of the establishment and they are better off educationally and financially than the average American. But how to characterize Muslim individuals who committed violence, who were unconnected to any radical network and who were clearly simply mentally ill? Initially Islamophobic diction wasn’t deployed in their regard. But over time, those promoting bigotry managed to make it respectable to sweep even these often mentally fragile individuals up into “terrorism.” The buzzwords used were “lone wolf” and “self-radicalized.”

Emphasis Mine

And so the racist constuction of the Capitalist society continues in order to keep all of us in fear of each other.