Of course he wasn’t. He is alleged to have done some very, very bad things but I think the average US citizen would be hard pressed to label him a terrorist. Yet, his words in this video are exactly the sort of things when said in the Middle East, land folks in a US torture cell.
He speaks about the pain of seeing people whipped, raped, lynched… he talks about how no Black person (especially women) should break ranks and “turn your brother in” to the authorities. In his world view, Black people should be united against a common oppressor. [I would guess that he was not against justice served within the Black community by Black folks… but it is a safe bet that he believed any crimes he committed would exact little punishment.]
What alarms me about this video is how tame it is compared to what I have heard while growing up in Oakland/Berkeley. Most of what is captured could be labeled misguided at worst. Certainly it is not scary or threatening. He is just speaking about how folks who have historically be oppressed need to group together and fight an enemy that has proven over and over to be no friend of Black people.
Yet in today’s language translation exercises, if these same ideas were uttered by an Arab, folks would get all up in arms over it. Or even better, if his words were uttered by Mike Huckabee against Muslims, the vast majority of US citizens would affirm the ideas to be self-evident. Is not the USA supreme over the backwards lands of the Middle East? Should not the USA empower itself and fight against the sand savages?
Terrorism is a word used by those in power to belittle and dehumanize their opponents.