It turned out that the twenty-year-old neo-Nazi who killed Heather Heyer had been open about his racist views since high school. He attended the march in Virginia with the white supremacist group known as Vanguard America. After his capture, he was charged in Virginia state court with murder and in federal court with hate crimes. However, it should be noted that he was not charged as a terrorist (despite then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions initially describing the Charlottesville attack as meeting “the definition of domestic terrorism” under federal law). Yet in announcing the federal indictment ten months later, Jeff Sessions avoided using the word “terrorism” altogether. Instead, he said that the Justice Department remained resolute that hateful ideologies will not have the last word and that their adherents will not get away with violent crimes against those they target. Which is all well and good, but not the same as charging someone with terrorism.

QUESTION: Why was the attack not prosecuted as domestic terrorism when Sessions himself acknowledged it met the definition? Worth investigating how terrorism charges are discretionarily applied to white supremacists versus others.

QUESTION: Why do federal officials avoid the terrorism designation for domestic white supremacist violence while readily applying it to other violence? This warrants investigation into legal and political reasons.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 226