"Terrorists Are Always Muslim but Never White": Actual explanation

I happened to stumble across an essay named Terrorists Are Always Muslim but Never White.

As you might have guessed, the essay has quite clearly been written by a far-leftist activist and grifter who, unsurprisingly and obviously, attributes the typical mental picture of a terrorist as being a Muslim to racism. Of course. Because there is no other possible explanation.

But let's take the question seriously (or, rather, a question that could be extracted from that inflammatory essay): Why is it that when a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, he is called a "Muslim terrorist", but when a white person commits such an act, he's not called a "white terrorist" (even though the far left is trying their hardest to change that)?

There are many reasons for this:

"Muslim" is not a race. It's a religious denomination. "White" in this context is a race. Much unlike the far-leftists want to claim, the vast majority of people are not racists and thus do not classify notorious people by their race. They don't say "a white terrorist" any more than they say "a black terrorist", or "a hispanic terrorist", etc.

This is because race doesn't usually play a role in terrorism. In other words, with only a vanishingly small number of exceptions, the absolute majority of terrorist acts are not done in the name of a particular race (as much as the far left would want to deny that). Terrorist acts are done primarily with three motivations: Political, religious or personal issues (that are usually unrelated to one's own race).

If a terrorist act has a clear motive behind it, people tend to attach that motivation to the moniker "terrorist". In other words, if say a member of the IRA commits a terrorist attack, people tend to call him an "IRA terrorist". If someone commits a terrorist attack in the name of Communism, then people tend to call him a "Communist terrorist". And, likewise, if someone commits a terrorist attack in the name of Islam, people tend to call him a "Muslim terrorist".

If there's no well-known large-scale ideology behind the terrorist attack, then people tend to not attach any adjective to the word at all. For example in 2017 a man committed a mass shooting in Las Vegas, killing 60 people and wounding over 400. People generally don't attach any adjective when calling him a "terrorist" because there was no clear motivation behind the attack, such as a political or religious one.

So, having made that clear, why does the archetypal picture of a "terrorist" elicit the image of an archetypal Arab Muslim?

Because like it or not, the vast, vast majority of terrorist attacks in the world are committed by Muslims, in the explicit name of Islam. If you do a bit of research you will find that these terrorist attacks are almost a daily occurrence. Just because the western media doesn't make a news report on every single one of them doesn't mean they don't happen.

More prominently, since at least the 1970's the vast majority of major terrorist attacks in western countries have been committed by Islamic terrorists, in the name of Islam. There are, rather obviously, quite prominent notorious example of other types of terrorist attacks, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of such attacks, for the last 40-50 years, have been committed by Muslims.

People notice trends and patterns, and tend to associate activities with the people who most often engage in those activities. That's not "racism". That's simply an observation.

There is no other religion in the world that commits even close to that many terrorist attacks worldwide. There are, of course, individual examples (and it does happen in most if not all major religions, including the ones that are archetypically seen as "pacifist", such as Buddhism), but they are just a microscopic minority in comparison.

This has absolutely nothing to do with race or racism. This is just a factual observation.