You thought you weren’t doing anything wrong, so why should you care about who they call a terrorist? Well, you may not believe it, but you’re likely a terror suspect in America’s new paradigm of the Land of the Fear.
The government is casting a wide net over its citizens in its search for potential threats. Now, you don’t need to actually commit a crime to be hauled away to a detention center and held without charges while you are tortured; you just need to appear suspicious by sympathizing with anti-government views to be labeled a domestic terrorist.
First, it’s important to understand the official definition of domestic terrorism in the United States. The ACLU reports that a person is a domestic terrorist if they engage in any “act dangerous to human life” that “appears to be intended to (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”
Although recent White House action plans claim to be targeting “violent extremism in all its forms,” the government itself is clearly guilty of countless “acts dangerous to human life intended to coerce the civilian population, to influence the policy, and to affect the conduct of a government.” But that’s for another article.
What’s more disturbing, is the government’s expansion of guilty parties to “terrorist sympathizers.” This is where the net gets really large. What exactly constitutes sympathizing with a terrorist? Is questioning the imperial foreign policy and the destruction of civil liberties, sympathizing with the enemy? In the U.S., it seems that if you don’t agree with the violence and coercion America commits, then you’re an anti-American terrorist sympathizer, as evidenced by peace organizations being added to terror watch lists.
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