Police in the United Kingdom have charged a white man with "terrorism offenses" after an attack on worshipers leaving a mosque in London on Monday.
Eight people were injured after the 47-year-old attacker rammed his van into a crowd of people leaving the Finsbury Park Mosque. According to media reports, one man died of a heart attack near to the scene, but it is unclear whether he was directly injured in the attack.
Witnesses said the driver yelled that he wanted to "kill all Muslims," making the incident a suspected hate crime.
British leaders quickly referred to the attack as terrorism
British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the police were treating the incident "as a potential terrorist attack." May added she will chair a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee - a cross-departmental crisis committee that discusses the response to national emergencies - regarding this attack.
London's mayor Sadiq Khan also condemned the incident as a "horrific terrorist attack on innocent people."
While the mainstream media and many Western leaders often associate terrorism primarily with Islam, leaders and police in the UK were quick to condemn the white attacker as a terrorist, reminding the world that terrorism doesn't have an ethnicity or religion.
White-supremacist terrorists are a major threat
In the United States, white supremacist terrorists pose a major threat to national security, but they are often brushed aside or overlooked.
"Law enforcement agencies in the U.S. consider anti-government violent extremists, not radicalized Muslims, to be the most severe threat of political violence that they face,” the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security reported, according to Newsweek.
Between 2002 and early 2016, individuals associated with white supremacist groups were responsible for more terrorist attacks and more deaths in the U.S. than individuals associating themselves with Islamist extremists.
At the same time, hate crimes targeting Muslims have increased in the U.S., spiking by 67 percent in 2015, according to an official FBI report.
But Muslims are still portrayed as the terrorists
And anti-Muslim hatred is out of control
Fortunately, British and Canadian leaders appear to be changing the narrative
Following an attack on worshipers in a Canadian mosque by a white supremacist terrorist earlier this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the incident "an act of terror committed against Canada, and against all Canadians."
Similarly, the UK's leaders and police have taken a stand in the wake of Monday's incident, demonstrating that terrorism is not associated with one group.