Editor's note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com and legal fellow for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C.
(CNN) -- Within the last month, our country has witnessed two senseless, high-profile acts of criminal violence that would have been labeled terrorism if brown-skinned Arab Muslim men with foreign-sounding names had committed them.
Because two white men committed these acts of violence, however, our political and media chattering class never used the word "terrorism" in its discussions.
Most recently, John Patrick Bedell, a 36-year-old man from California, walked up to two security guards outside the Pentagon Metro station in suburban Washington and started shooting. He was then shot and killed. According to The Christian Science Monitor, Bedell appeared "to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent anti-government feelings" and also battled mental illness before his shooting rampage.
A few weeks ago, on February 18, another white anti-government extremist named Joseph Stack flew his small airplane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas, killing two people and injuring 13 others.
According to media reports, Stack had left behind a disjointed suicide letter in which he expressed his hatred of our American government and outlined grievances with the IRS, chillingly stating that "violence not only is the answer; it is the only answer."
Both the Pentagon Metro and IRS attacks come at a time of "explosive growth in [domestic] extremist-group activism across the United States," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
A recently released law center report showed so-called patriot groups -- steeped in anti-government conspiracy theories -- grew from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009 -- a 244 percent increase that the Southern Poverty Law Center report judged to be an "astonishing" rise in the one-year period since President Obama took the oath of office. The number of these groups that are domestic extremist paramilitary militias grew from 42 in 2008 to 127 in 2009, the report said.
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