A man walked into the New Orleans airport on March 20, swung his machete at TSA officers and sprayed poison at them. His duffel bag contained six homemade bombs. His motives remain unknown; and to many Americans, his actions do, too, because the news media paid little attention to them.

Richard White, the 63-year-old attacker, died after he was shot during the assault, but the media had little interest in his motives, identity or religion. Why not? Because he was neither an Arab nor a Muslim.

The fact that White was a devout Jehovah’s Witness was only mentioned in passing in the stories written about the crime. 

If a Muslim had been behind this assault, it would have been branded as terrorism and splashed across breaking news TV screens and front pages all over the country. 

When the perpetrator of mass violence is not a Muslim, the crime is hardly ever labeled as terrorism by media pundits. Non-Muslim attackers are often described as a troubled people with mental issues. 

Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-New Orleans) was quick to bring up mental illness as the reason behind Friday’s crime. The congressman pledged to improve mental health treatments for those who might carry out attacks. 

White could have had mental issues. But individuals who have committed terrorist acts in the name of Islam might have been mentally troubled as well. 

We don’t know yet why White attacked the New Orleans airport. 

However, local and federal authorities in Austin, Texas have ruled that when Larry Steve McQuilliams started shooting at downtown buildings— including the Mexican Consulate— last November, his crime was “politically and religiously motivated.” 

Police tied McQuilliams to Christian extremism and found several Christian fundamentalist religious texts in the van he used in the attacks. If you haven’t heard of McQuilliams, who could have committed a massacre if a cop had not shot him dead during the rampage, it is because the national media had no interest in this newsworthy story. 

McQuilliams was a White terrorist, whose image broadcast over the airwaves could have broken the masses’ generalizations and perceptions about terrorism. Out of laziness and to boost ratings, the mainstream media prefer simpler narratives.

On Wednesday, a German copilot deliberately crashed a Germanwings airplane into the Alps, killing all 150 on board. Andreas Lubitz, who locked everybody out of the cockpit and destroyed the plane, was not a Muslim. Thus, the mass murder was not described as terrorism by the media and public officials. In fact German and French officials ruled out the possibility of a terrorist attack in the incident. 

The United Nations defines terrorism as, “criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes.”

However, in the post 9/11 era, terrorism became a label attached to Arabs and Muslims. After the Jan. 7 Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, “Not all Muslims are terrorist, but all terrorists are Muslim” became a popular statement among anti-Muslim pundits. 

If you haven’t heard of McQuilliams and assume that White was mentally ill, you might find this absurd statement true. However, according to an FBI report, 94 percents of all terrorist attacks in the United States between 1980 and 2005— including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people— were carried out by non-Muslims. 

Making terrorism appear exclusive to Islam paints the religion as the source of global terror and demonizes all of its followers. The recent rise of Islamophobia could be linked to the gruesome images of ISIS’s crimes, but it is also tied to the media creating an exclusive link between terrorism and Islam.