The new year shows terrorism isn't going away

If there is anything 2015 appears to be teaching us so far it's that terrorism isn't going away.

The FBI is investigating whether an explosion Tuesday outside NAACP offices in Colorado Springs was an act of domestic terrorism.

And authorities in Paris are investigating the terrorist attack Wednesday on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that killed a dozen people.

When attacks took place on 9-11 in New York City and the nation's capital, killing nearly 3,000 people, some commentators talked about this and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Trade Center as being the first terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

But the truth was that terrorism took place here long before.

The Ku Klux Klan began terrorizing African Americans after the end of the Civil War.

In the 1960s, Klansmen bombed churches, synagogues and the homes of the civil rights activists. The most notorious of those bombings took place in 1963, killing four girls in a Birmingham church and injuring 23 others.

The FBI blamed the White Knights of Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi for at least 10 killings.

When a federal building was blown up in Oklahoma City in 1995, commentators called the act terrorism — until it was discovered that the perpetrators were homegrown.

Same with the bombings of abortion clinics and the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta.

It's good news to know that the FBI and others are beginning to use the term "domestic terrorism" in referring to these attacks that are taking place on American soil.

There have long been terrorists on our shores. We have just never called them that.

As then-U.S. Attorney Doug Jones told jurors in his 2001 prosecution of the KKK bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls, "Before the days that the word terrorism came into our vocabulary, this was an act of terrorism."