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7 Jan, 6 tweets, 2 min read
I feel like people think I'm just idly tweeting about using the word "terrorist" to describe some of the men who stormed the capitol--the ones with weapons, zip-ties for hostages and explosives. I've interviewed dozens of designated terrorists. For my job. sulomeanderson.com/stories/
I insist on this point because A) that's what we would call them if they were Arab and B) because if we don't use the right wording, if we continue to downplay this kind of violence and intimidation by white extremists, they will continue to exploit that, and people will die.
The men we saw at the capitol yesterday were not the worst of these kinds of domestic terrorists, who behave in ways barely distinguishable from Islamist terrorists. For a little primer, here's a @washingtonpost piece of mine about online radicalization. washingtonpost.com/news/postevery…
Robert Bowers. Brenton Tarrant. Patrick Crusius. Those are the worst of them. More are out there. They share the same ideology and goals as the men who showed up at the capitol to take hostages and blow things up. And next time, they might be better at it. forbes.com/sites/carliepo…
God bless you, Mr. Rather. Thank you for calling it what it is.
P.S. Perhaps I've been a bit confusing on one specific point; or not articulated it well. I never meant that what the majority of those idiots did was terrorism or that they're all terrorists. But there were definitely terrorists there--incompetent ones. But the next might not be

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More from @SulomeAnderson

Sulome Profile picture
8 Jan
This debate over whether to call an attempt to take hostages and blow people up terrorism is confusing me. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not arguing the legal angle (though @hoffman_bruce makes a good case for it here). I think white terrorism should be taken as seriously as Islamist. Image
We know white supremacist terrorism is the greater threat now. So why do we talk about it differently than Islamist terrorism? Why is it covered differently in the news, as was on full display at the capitol? Why are we so unprepared to deal with it? csis.org/analysis/escal…
I agree the word “terrorism” is a shitty label that has adversely impacted people of color. But it’s not going away, and I think it’s past time to apply it to white supremacists the same way we would Islamists. Because this is what happens when we don’t: nytimes.com/2018/11/03/mag…
Read 5 tweets
Sulome Profile picture
6 Jan
Well kudos to everyone who has been downplaying or dismissing the threat of White ISIS for years.
Seriously, congrats to the Very Serious People who thought it was “hysterical” to be worried about ARMED WHITE SUPREMACIST MILITIAS IN THE STREETS ffs. At least you weren’t hysterical.
A toast is also due to the DC and NYC journalists who smugly ignored what their foreign correspondent and conflict reporter colleagues have been pointing at for many months now as evidence the political environment in the U.S. is spiraling out of control. Maybe listen next time.
Read 4 tweets
Sulome Profile picture
19 Dec 20
At some point, all reporters miss things they should have caught. This is one of mine. I wrote this @TheAtlantic story in 2014 about abuse at wilderness programs for troubled teens. I visited a program called Redcliff Ascent in Utah, here @TroubledKidHelp. theatlantic.com/health/archive…
The situation at Redcliff was not one I would have wanted to end up in as a teenager, but the landscape was stunningly beautiful, and I was being shown around by a very nice and sincere man, who truly seemed to mean well. His sincerity made me miss what I should not have.
I had heard horrific stories of abuse at other camps, but staff at Redcliff introduced me to kids who seemed healthy and, if not happy, at least not being tortured. I opened with an anecdote about a red-faced, heavy-set girl I never spoke with, who was crying to go home.
Read 8 tweets
Sulome Profile picture
21 Nov 20
Glenn Greenwald has the nicest fans
This is a thread about how dangerous idiots can be. I will be attaching screenshots of all the tweets I just received in response to the below tweet. There are hundreds of them, most calling me a spy. Please allow me to explain why this is a problem.
I am morally opposed to journalists working as intelligence agents. Why? Because after my father, a journalist, was kidnapped by terrorists, they tortured him again and again for years, calling him CIA. "I am not a spy!" he would scream. "I am a reporter!" It never stopped them.
Read 9 tweets
Sulome Profile picture
7 Nov 20
My mom likes to tell the story of how, as a toddler born in the U.S. who left a week later, I grew up overseas and knew very few Americans; but even when I could barely speak, I would become very upset when people said I was Cypriot.

“NO,” I would yell at them. “I AM AMEWICAN.”
I was always quite a moral child, and I somehow knew we were supposed to be a place where people didn’t hurt each other for no reason, like they did in wars, which was most of what I had been exposed to at that point. Bad men didn’t take fathers there, like mine had been taken.
My dad was kidnapped for being American in a place where that made you valuable, for the wrong reasons. My mother still brought me in and out of Lebanon during the war. “Don’t tell anyone you’re American,” she would hiss at me there. “Don’t speak any English at all. Only Arabic.”
Read 6 tweets
Sulome Profile picture
19 Sep 20
Good morning to the journalists and pundits who spent three and a half years pooh-poohing any suggestion we might be heading down a road to authoritarianism and doing backflips to contort everything that led us here into some semblance of normality
The ultimate tragedy of what’s happening isn’t that it came out of nowhere. It’s that it was so blatantly obvious every step of the way, and could perhaps have been prevented, had every headline from mid-2015 onwards fulfilled the basic role of journalism to warn the public.
“What did you do as your democracy crumbled in front of the world, Daddy/Mommy?”

“I RePoRtEd BoTh SiDeZ EqUaLlY, JoHnNy.”
Read 5 tweets

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