My Take: Sikh Temple Shooting Is Act of Terrorism

Imagine that you woke up on a beautiful Sunday morning to hear the news of a brown, bearded, gun-wielding madman who stormed into a Wisconsin church full of blond-haired parishioners and killed six innocent people.

If that scenario did occur, would most Americans have any problem calling that an act of “terrorism”?

Of course not.

Now imagine that the shooter was a white man and the innocent victims were bearded brown men and head-covered women. Suddenly, the discussion of “terrorism” gets a lot more complicated.

Of course, this is exactly what happened in a Milwaukee suburb on Sunday, when six people and the alleged gunman were killed at a Sikh temple.

One of the congregation’s members told a local news station, “Nobody’s angry here. We’re just confused. Was this a random act? Was this directed at us because of the way we look?”

Sadly, it’s probably going to be the latter…

Click here to read the rest of the article, published by CNN on August 6, 2012.
 
Arsalan Iftikhar is an ISPU Fellow, an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com and author of the book “Islamic Pacifism: Global Muslims in the Post-Osama Era.”

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