In the past months there has been a lot of debate about the difference between radical Muslims and radical Christians, especially in the media. Since the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado occurred only five days before the San Bernardino shooting, most of the news overlapped. The events sparked conversations on religious radicalization and many news outlets portrayed the shootings in different ways. Because of the more frequent events involving ISIS and other muslim terrorist groups, the media focused more on San Bernardino. The term “radical Muslim” came up many times during the coverage of the San Bernardino events even before the FBI said they were investigating it as an act of terrorism. Additionally, there was no reference to “radical Christianity” in the coverage of the Planned Parenthood attack. But what is the difference between the two?

On December 2, 2015, Syed Rizwan
Farook and Tashfeen Malik, armed with semi-automatic weapons, walked into a holiday party hosted by Farook’s employer, and opened fire on a crowd of approximately 80 people. They killed 14 individuals and injured 22.

After the event, the media raised suspicion that the two perpetrators might be linked to an Islamic terrorist group. President Obama weighed in on the terrorist accusations saying, “It is possible that this was terrorist-related, but we don’t know. It’s also possible that this was workplace-related.” It came out only a couple of days later that one of them had pledged allegiance to the leader of ISIS on their facebook page. However, Obama was reluctant to call the shooters Islamic terrorists. Obama has gotten a lot of criticism from GOP candidates about his unwillingness to use the term
Islamic terrorist or extremist.

In Colorado, at a Planned Parenthood facility, 57 year old Robert Dear held hostages and opened fire killing two civilians and one police officer, and injuring many more. Some media outlets quickly started asking questions about whether Dear was politically motivated. The witnesses reported that he was opposed to safe and legal abortion.

Other media sources wondered whether the attacker was religiously motivated or not. One New York Times writer interviewed a man who talked with Dear about his religious writing: “Mr Dear had praised people who attacked abortion providers, saying they were doing ‘God’s work.’” Mr. Dear described them as “heroes,” members of the Army of God, a loosely organized group of anti-abortion extremists that has claimed responsibility for a number of killings and bombings. Most news organizations did not refer to Dear as any type of religious extremist, even though the evidence shows his strong religious views and ties to certain religious radical groups.

Mike Huckabee, a GOP candidate, called Dear a “domestic extremist”, but did not make any reference to radical Christianity as a motive. People on social media commented that critics of Obama call him out for not using the term “Islamic extremist” when talking about terrorists, but the same critics are hesitant to call Dear a “Christian extremist”.

Whittier asked Joslyn Gardner ’16 whether she thought Dear should be called a “Christian extremist.” She says, “I don’t think he should be called a Christian extremist. Why does religion and terrorism have to go hand and hand? What he did was not following Christian principles, and his actions shouldn’t be associated with Christianity because they are not Christian.” When asked whether the San Bernardino shooters should be considered “Islamic terrorists”, she says, “No I don’t think they should be called Muslim Extremists.”

I don’t believe they are practicing Islam. That’s why other countries, like France, are calling ISIS Daesh because it’s offensive to associate these acts of terrorism with Muslims. It’s another problem with the media. Black people are called thugs, gangsters. Muslims are terrorists, yet when white people commit acts of terrorism they are troubled.”.

With the ever more frequent massacres around the globe tied to ISIS, people in America and all around the world are fearful of events happening on their own soil. So, when the San Bernardino shooting happened only a few weeks after the Paris attacks, many news agencies and people started focusing on the religion that all the suspects were tied to: Islam. In contrast, during the shooting in Colorado, the media focused less on Dear’s radical Christian ties, and proposed that he was politically motivated instead because of his anti-abortion stance. The question still remains: If all terrorism isn’t being treated equally in the media, how can we make it so in society?