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IPFS News Link • TERRORISM

San Bernardino shooting: US divided over whether attack was terrorism

• TheGuardian

Even before the facts of the San Bernardino mass shooting are in, a familiar argument is dividing Americans along political, religious and racial lines: was this terrorism? The rightwing news site Breitbart.com wasted little time describing Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik as the "jihadis next door", even before initial reports emerged that the couple may have visited radical Islamist websites and had unspecified forms of contact with people being investigated for links to extremist groups. Other outlets preferred to focus on the fact that Farook worked for the county public health department whose holiday party was targeted without immediately assuming his religion or political beliefs had anything to do with it.

Across social media sites, people asked if the "T-word" would have been invoked so quickly if the couple were white Christians instead of brown-skinned Muslims. Some saw a double standard between the way events in San Bernardino have been characterized and last weekend's murders at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, whose alleged perpetrator was notoriously described in the New York Times as a "gentle loner", not a terrorist, despite the apparent political motivation behind his attack.


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