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It looked odd at the time. In late March our foreign minister tweeted “Today, at the UN Security Council, Canada condemned white supremacist terrorism. This grave terrorist threat must not be ignored and must be at the top of the agenda when we talk about confronting terrorism.” Really? I thought. At the top? Is it the one most likely to kill people?

Following the Easter massacre in Sri Lanka, with over 300 dead and which ISIL has now taken responsibility for, I think “odd” looks today like an insufficient term. Naturally everybody’s against white supremacy. And with solid historical reason given the evil it did over the past 500 years. But for all the horrors of racial slavery, the biggest killers in the 20th century were Mao, Stalin and Hitler, and in no case was skin colour an issue. In the Holocaust, ethnicity was explicit, and in the Holodomor, class warfare intersected with a cultural tradition of individual farming, not communal farming, to make Ukrainians the main target of Stalin’s deliberately engineered famine. And today the biggest threat isn’t the one related to race, and our foreign minister shouldn’t be in denial about it.

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If you say anything that downplays white nationalism as an ideological force or source of violence, some fool will claim you’re blowing a racist dog whistle. And will probably misspell it. But the accusation is grotesque because one thing that struck me immediately about Chrystia Freeland’s tweet was its callousness about non-white lives. The vast majority of some 20,000 terror victims in the world, year after year, are not killed by white supremacists. The most common terror victims are non-white Muslims killed by non-white Muslim terrorists. Wikipedia, for instance, says four attacks last year killed over 100 people each. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Nigeria. All by Islamists. Drill down to the monthly list of smaller incidents and it’s almost entirely non-whites, killed by Islamists with the occasional Maoist or purely local ethnic motive.