Donald Trump and a significant number of his followers believe the United States should ban all Muslims from entering the country because of the terrorist acts of a few, but the fact is this country has a long history of non-Muslim-inspired terrorism. 

When you get right down to it, many of our founding fathers were considered terrorists, and rightly so, by their British overlords. 

The Boston Tea Party was one of many terrorist acts committed by the Sons of Liberty in the days leading up to a complete break with Britain. At the time, it was not unusual for tax collectors to be treated to the 18th-century equivalent of waterboarding: They were stripped naked, dipped in tar, covered with feathers and carried out of town on a fence rail. 

And it didn’t stop once we won independence. 

During George Washington’s second term as president, he was called into the field to put down a rebellion by farmers in western Pennsylvania.

“Gangs of insurgents with blackened faces began to attack federal officials, beating and torturing the tax collectors who attempted to collect the first federal tax ever laid on an American product — whiskey,” according to the book “The Whiskey Rebellion,” by William Hogeland. For nearly a century, the American frontier was fraught with terrorism on both sides, even in Iowa, where 35-40 settlers were killed in the 1857 Spirit Lake Massacre. 

The period leading up to the Civil War was rank with terrorist acts, including the 1837 killing of Elijah P. Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer, by a pro-slavery mob. In 1856, abolitionist John Brown led a raid into Kansas that killed five slavery supporters. 

When people talk about terrorism, they rarely mention slaves who were tortured, raped and killed in the South before 1860, probably because terrorism on such a scale is too awful to consider today. 

Pre-Civil War terror wasn’t limited to the South or the frontier. Missouri Gov. Lilburn Boggs signed an executive order in 1838 known as the Mormon Extermination Order, making it legal to kill Mormons. 

Of course, the Civil War was our greatest terror, resulting in more than 620,000 deaths, including our first presidential assassination.  

Post-Civil War, the terror continued for Americans of color at the hands of thugs like Jesse James and the Ku Klux Klan. 

By the end of the 19th century, a new type of terror involving labor had emerged. 

On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown into a line of advancing police during a labor protest in Haymarket Square in Chicago, killing one officer and igniting a gunbattle that left seven policemen and four workers dead. 

An anarchist assassinated President William McKinley in 1901. 

Between 1905 and 1940, Wikipedia lists 13 incidents of terrorist bombings in the United States, including a 1910 explosion at the Los Angeles Times that killed 21 workers, a 1915 bomb that went off in a reception room of the U.S. Senate and a 1920 explosion on Wall Street that killed 38. 

Future President Franklin Roosevelt was nearly killed in 1918 when an anarchist bomb exploded at the Washington, D.C., home of FDR’s neighbor, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. And up to 300 people were killed in riots after dynamite was dropped in 1921 by whites from an airplane onto a black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla.

And I haven’t even gotten to the anti-Vietnam War bombings, which included four explosions in Iowa, or Timothy McVey’s 1995 destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 165, or the anti-abortion violence that’s plagued us in recent years. 

My point is that given our history, we have a lot more than Muslims to worry about.