Shaima Alawadi fled Iraq to escape the brutal oppression she and her family suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein.
 
They lived in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia before moving to El Cajon, Calif., not far from San Diego.
In a tragic twist of irony, it wasn’t until she made it to the U.S. that she felt terror again.
On March 24, Alawadi’s 17-year-old daughter found her bludgeoned into a coma. Someone had broken in the back door and taken a tire iron to the mother of five.
Authorities found a hastily scrawled note next to the woman’s body: “Go back to your own country, terrorist.”
Right, because escaping a war-torn nation in the hopes of giving your children a better life is terrorism, and beating women with tire irons is not.
It’s high time we reconsider what constitutes terrorism.
We have come to relate terrorism with a set of identifying traits, a particular ethnicity or a particular religion. This is a dangerous, perhaps even deadly, misunderstanding.
Three days after Alawadi’s daughter found her unconscious on the dining room floor, Shaima was taken off life support and flown back to Iraq for burial.
I guess her assailant got what he wanted.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, crimes of discrimination have actually risen over the past few years, specifically against Muslims and people of Middle-Eastern or South-Asian descent.
In the San Diego area, where the Alawadi family lives, incidents of discrimination and “agenda-motivated” violence have tripled since 2010, and the FBI has noted a marked and troubling increase in the number of hate organizations that have formed over the last two years.
And this is in California, a state with a reputation for being open and liberal.
I am convinced we are a nation whose strength comes from our respect and tolerance of one another. The last few weeks, however, have shaken that conviction.
We’ve witnessed the gunning down of 17 innocents in Afghanistan, the murder of Trayvon Martin and the brutal beating of Shaima Alawadi.
Yet no one referred to any of these crimes as being acts of terror, and the murder of Alawadi barely got more than a headline.
Some have suggested these incidents of hatred and violence are the byproduct of a war-weary American public, pushed to their limits by a struggling economy and a decade of armed conflict overseas.
I don’t buy it. In fact, I believe the best thing we could do now is to zealously continue our war on terror. Especially the terror which has been perpetrated against our own citizens, in our own country.
We should not move into this new phase of the war on terror with more foreign intervention or by increasing our drone strikes abroad, but instead by expanding and refining our definition of what a terrorist is.
A terrorist is someone who inflicts pain and horror on others, be they in Afghanistan, San Diego, or Florida. A terrorist is someone who rips families apart.
Shaima Alawadi was not a terrorist. Her killer was.
We should hunt down and bring these terrorists to justice, whether members of al-Qaida, the Taliban or a Florida neighborhood watch.
Nicholas Pierce is a 22-year-old history junior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_nabdulpierc.
 
—-
Contact Nicholas Pierce at [email protected]