Cable Street Particular

I am extremely unhappy with the number of times I have seen members of the media, and various people on Twitter, call this “the first act of terrorism on American soil since 9/11.”

Sure it is. If you ignore every single incident of anti-choice terrorism—including the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller, and a number of clinic bombings and acts of vandalism, including one as recently as last week.

This flagrant, shameless campaign of intimidation, harassment, and threats and acts of violence against healthcare providers who offer services to women and other people with uteri, and the spaces in which they offer them, in defense of an inherently violent ideology, is a comprehensive terrorist movement which, from just 1977 to 2011, has included multiple assassinations, multiple attempted assassinations, and over 200 arsons and bombings.

This is not the first act of terrorism on US soil since 9/11. And every time someone says that, what they’re really saying is: “This is the first act of terrorism on US soil against People Who Matter.”

And of course abortionists, abortion advocates, and abortion-seeking people are not the only people who have been terrorized since 9/11. The mass shooting at a Sikh temple was last August, for fuck’s sake. And what about the guy who flew his plane into a federal IRS building in Austin in 2010? Or the white supremacist who attempted to bomb an MLK Day Parade in Spokane in 2011? Etc.

There have been other acts of terrorism in the US since 9/11. But because they are directed at women and/or at people of color, because they happen outside major coastal cities, because the people who write about them aren’t doing it in columns at USA Today, these acts of terrorism don’t count.

I have a problem with that.