Today in Terrorism We'll Call Anything Else

[Content Note: Terrorism; white supremacy; racism; anti-semitism; Islamophobia.]

The word "terrorism" is nowhere in this AP article about five white supremacists who have been "charged in Virginia with trying to illegally buy weapons and explosives to use in attacks on synagogues and black churches."

Robert C. Doyle and Ronald Beasley Chaney III tried to buy an automatic weapon, explosives and a pistol with a silencer from three undercover agents posing as illegal firearms dealers, FBI agent James R. Rudisill wrote in an affidavit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Richmond.

Doyle, 34, and Chaney, 33, are charged with conspiracy to possess firearms after being convicted of felonies, according to the affidavit.

An associate, 30-year-old Charles D. Halderman, is accused of plotting to rob a jeweler and use the money to help Doyle buy land and stockpile weapons for "an impending race war," the affidavit says. He is charged with a robbery conspiracy.

...Meanwhile, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Chaney's father, 58-year-old Ronald Beasley Chaney Jr., and 52-year-old Terry Gunn Chaney were charged with drug and firearms offenses after Henrico County police executed a search warrant at a home in Highland Springs on Sunday. The newspaper said Terry Gunn Chaney is "believed to be'" the wife of Ronald Beasley Chaney Jr.

...According to Rudisill's affidavit, Doyle and the younger Chaney "ascribe to a white supremacy extremist version of the Asatru faith," a pagan sect that emphasizes Norse gods and traditions. The affidavit says the FBI learned that Doyle planned to host a meeting at his home in late September to discuss "shooting or bombing the occupants of black churches and Jewish synagogues, conducting acts of violence against persons of Jewish faith, and doing harm to a gun store owner in the state of Oklahoma."

White supremacists are walking into black churches, Sikh temples, and Jewish centers and opening fire, black churches are being torched by white arsonists, black students are being threatened on their campuses, violent incidents of anti-semitism and Islamophobia are on the rise, and our media and politicians still pretend that the biggest terrorist threat in the US is Islamic extremists and that #BlackLivesMatter activists are dangerous.

(And many attacks on abortion clinics, women, LGB people, and trans people are perpetrated by men affiliated with white supremacy, too.)

The biggest terrorist threat in the US is white supremacy. Period.