Interesting how the news works.
Greyhawk reports over at Mudville Gazette:
Indeed. Click that Mudville link - there's more juicy stuff there.
Greyhawk reports over at Mudville Gazette:
Chuck Z, of From My Position, added in email words that echo my thoughts:Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge just announced that the shooting at the Holocaust Museum - allegedly by an 89-year old WWII veteran - confirms a recent DHS report regarding the threat posed by extremist veterans.
Shepard Smith adds "They [DHS] saw the signs, now it has begun". Smith keeps hammering on that angle...
Also, interesting how an octogenarian white guy is compared to a domestic terrorist, yet, a 23 year old muslim guns down two soldiers at a recruiting station, and /crickets/
Indeed. Click that Mudville link - there's more juicy stuff there.
Unfortunately, as a society we are already predisposed to believe that a 23-year-old black Muslim male is quite capable of committing a drive-by shooting. Nor are we all that surprised by the fact that he claims to have been motivated by the actions of American troops overseas. The fact that the victims were soldiers standing outside a recruiting station is the only fact that made the incident noteworthy. Had the victims instead been two 19-year-old men standing outside a convenience store, I cannot imagine that anyone outside Little Rock would have even heard about the incident. That says something about our society that I am not certain is to its credit.
All that having been said, I think we are starting to be overly free with the use of the term "terrorism." If either of these attacks qualify as a terrorist act, (and at present I'm not convinced that either should necessarily be so categorized,) why would the April, 2007 attack on the campus of Virginia Tech not also be considered a terrorist incident?
Unfortunately, "terrorist" seems to be becoming the latest ugly adjective with which people try to bludgeon their opponents. When the president of the police union local here in Atlanta recently told a reporter that the city's consistent pattern of mistreating police officers disabled in the line of duty under the guise of "managing" the officer's Worker's Compensation benefits makes him so frustrated and angry that he wants to beat Mayor Shirley Jackson with a baseball bat, Mayor Jackson responded by having him suspended by the Atlanta PD, and filed a criminal complaint against him with the United States Attorney for "making terroristic threats."
It strikes me that if a given incident is not deliberately intended and, more importantly, realistically likely to alter the way a community or nation acts because that community or nation comes to fear the prospect of further similar incidents, it's probably not appropriate to think of it as a "terrorist" incident. Using the term "terrorism" to describe incidents such as these glorifies the perpetrators in the eyes of others, and grants their actions a form of sanction which I think is wholly inappropriate. Treating them as ordinary criminals rather than as noble warriors denies them that glory and that sanction, and defeats the political purpose that drives terrorism to begin with.