White supremacist killers are prosecuted as hate criminals rather than charged as terrorists

Evidence

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. — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 226

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core asymmetry thesis: right-wing terror is not labeled terrorism while Muslim violence is — parallels Kumar and Sweida-Metwally’s work on the racialized terrorism label. — connects to: Lax US gun laws let white supremacist hate crimes threaten everyone — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 102; Preemptive prosecution is applied to Muslims but not to armed white militias — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 488; White mass shooters are exempted from terrorism charges by being labeled lone wolves (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: the legal doubling that lets the same lethal ideology be a ‘hate crime’ for white perpetrators but ‘terrorism’ for Muslim ones — a prosecutorial taxonomy of fear.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 226

Related

• Lax US gun laws let white supremacist hate crimes threaten everyone (similarity 0.85)
• White supremacist violence is analyzed without racial profiling theories. (similarity 0.82)
• Preemptive prosecution is applied to Muslims but not to armed white militias (similarity 0.80)
• White supremacist violence goes unlabeled as terrorism due to actors’ racial identity (similarity 0.80)
• White mass shooters are exempted from terrorism charges by being labeled lone wolves (similarity 0.79)
• Terrorism is a racial construct that excludes white freedom fighters (similarity 0.79)
• White supremacist violence kills nearly as many Americans as Muslim terrorism. (similarity 0.78)
• The hate driving white-supremacist terrorism is not personal but abstract. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• White mass shooters are exempted from terrorism charges by being labeled lone wolves #corroborates (0.80)
• Preemptive prosecution is applied to Muslims but not to armed white militias #corroborates (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 488
• Terrorism is a racial construct that excludes white freedom fighters #expands (0.65)