Why do terrorists attack houses of worship?
With the mosque shooting in New Zealand, the bombings of churches in Sri Lanka and the attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, each of the major monotheistic religions have had places of worship attacked by terrorists almost within a month. Houses of worship are a common target for racial and religious supremacists. In the United States, there have been, within the last decade, neo-Nazi shootings at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a black church in Charleston, South Carolina and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These events have kept alive a grim tradition, going back to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, where Ku Klux Klansmen attacked a church with dynamite and killed four little girls.
