How many times have we read or heard that all terror attacks have been committed by Muslims? It has been repeated by a lot of politicians, however, no one questions whether this statement is true or not. No one knows that (according to the site ThinkProgress) only 2 percent of the terrorist attacks in the EU were religiously-motivated. In the USA, the scale of religiously-motivated attacks is slightly higher. However, Islamic extremists are behind all the extremists group in carrying out any terrorist attacks in the EU and even the USA. According to the Princeton University Loo Watch, Islamic extremists were responsible for only 6 percent of terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2005. A lot of attacks were committed by others, such as Latino groups, Jewish extremists, and extreme left-wing groups, as well as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Separatists and other extremists.

Obviously, some people who consider themselves Muslims committed some horrible terror attacks using the name of Islam. This doesn’t mean that their actions are based on faith and Islam, but rather on their own unknown political agenda.

Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement agency, pointed out last year, that the majority of the attacks in the EU were followed through by separatist organizations. In 2013, more than 55 percent of terrorist attacks were committed by separatist groups. There is a long list of attacks that were not highlighted in the media in the way they should have been written and delivered to people. Take attacks that were committed by groups like France’s FLNC, that advocates an independent nation for the island of Corsica, for example. In December 2013, FLNC terrorists managed to commit simultaneous rocket attacks in police stations in two French cities. In Greece in 2013, the left-wing Militant Popular Revolutionary Forces shot two members of the right-wing political party. At the same time, in Italy, the anarchist group FAI was engaged in several different terror attacks like sending bomb to a journalist.

Have you ever heard of these attacks?

Probably not and that is not your fault. The media did not highlight these events. The question is how would the media tell the same stories about the attack if they were committed by Muslims? The answer is obvious. These issues would have been the headlines of mainstream newspapers and magazines.

Despite the low rate of Islamist militant attacks, the propaganda around Islamophobia is constantly stroked by politicians, law-enforcement officials, and, of course, by the media, simply because they have the tendency to highlight terrorists attacks committed by Islamic extremists over other political or environmental attacks.

For some reason, the New York Times and other mainstream media have a clear agenda to propagate Islamophobia and portray Muslims as a threat that needs to be prevented as soon as possible. Meanwhile, 98% of the terrorist attacks are left uncovered by media, that means people are left uneducated. For example, in 2011, when Anders Breivik committed one of the worst terror attacks in Europe, killing 77 people in Norway to push his“Pro-Christian Europe” agenda and his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant ideas, the media covered it far differently from the way they cover the attacks committed by Muslim terrorists. Neither the media, nor anyone else, questioned how to stop future Christian terrorists from committing further crimes. The idea of calling Breivik a “Christian terrorist” was not offered by any media source. In fact, they didn’t mention him as a terrorist at all.

The same applies to Buddhist terrorists who killed many Muslim civilians in Burma and burned down Muslim homes in Sri Lanka.

What about “price tag” attacks? “Price tag” attacks are ones committed by Jewish terrorists. In fact, according to the site Daily Beast, there were approximately 399 attacks committed by Israeli settlers.

The media is simply not eager to cover non-Muslim terror attacks. The media covers other attacks by calling them shootings, but they use the word terror only when the shooting is committed by a Muslim. We don’t hear a lot about other extremist groups committing the crime, just as we don’t see a lot of stories about people killed by gun violence, or women killed by domestic violence. However, we do hear a lot about how to stop a scary Muslim from killing again. In fact, there’s more chance that you would be struck by lightning than killed by a Muslim person.

The statement “Not All Muslims Are Terrorists, but All Terrorists Are Muslims” just fools the reader or listener and forces one to believe that only Muslims commit crimes. To support this statement and spread the fear, the media always portray the attacks committed by Islamic Extremists in a very dramatic way, meanwhile, omitting other dramatic attacks committed by non-Muslims.

This article was written by Nino Aphakidze.