Story highlights Peter Bergen: Incident shows that political violence in the US takes many forms

That includes right-wing terrorism -- which should be condemned as such

Peter Bergen is a CNN National Security Analyst, a vice president at New America and the author of "United States of Jihad: Who Are America's Homegrown Terrorists and How Do We Stop Them?" The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) On Saturday, a 20-year-old man from Ohio allegedly rammed his car into a group of people gathered to protest a white nationalist rally, killing a 32-year old woman and injuring 19 others. If James Alex Fields Jr., of Maumee, Ohio, indeed intended to harm the counter-protesters, then his act deserves to be branded domestic terrorism.

Political violence in the United States takes all shapes and forms and on Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, we saw one of its manifestations, militant right-wing terrorism.

New America, a non-partisan think tank that tracks political violence, finds that jihadist terrorists have killed 95 people in the United States since al Qaeda's attacks on 9/11, while the attack in Charlottesville brings the number to 68 people that have been killed by far-right terrorists in the States during the same time period.

Other forms of political violence have also emerged in the past couple of years. Black nationalist terrorists have killed 8 people in the United States since 2016, while in June a terrorist motivated by extremist anti-Trump views shot at a Republican congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, critically wounding Rep. Steve Scalise who is recovering.

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In December a man shot a weapon inside a pizzeria in Washington because he believed a conspiracy theory that the pizza joint was in fact a secret front for a child sex ring run by senior Democratic Party officials. Luckily, nobody was hurt in that attack.

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