When a man fueled by rage against the U.S. government and its tax code crashes his airplane into a building housing offices of the Internal Revenue Service, is it a criminal act or an act of terrorism?
The answer is simple, if it is not done by a Muslim it cannot possibly be called terrorism. But, a larger question is that is there any guarantee that no one else will carry out such an act? And to paraphrase a recent Congressional inquiry "what is the possibility that someone will make a similar attack or attempt to make a similar attack or might even be thinking about making a similar attack"? If we embark on this line of thinking and task Homeland Security to prevent all such future attacks then we can certainly expect that this great country of ours will become a paranoid police state with no liberty let alone privacy. And this is precisely what we are doing to a somewhat smaller scale by treating every act of terrorism (even those which caused no danage) as a 'potential' catastrophe. All the news media try to instill fear in the public, and slaesmen push for selling this or that gadgets (just imagine, how hard it would be to sell full-body scanners had it not been for the underwear bomber). But, if you say — cool down there aren't that many terrorists capable of doing anything significant — people will brand you as naive.
The answer is simple, if it is not done by a Muslim it cannot possibly be called terrorism. But, a larger question is that is there any guarantee that no one else will carry out such an act? And to paraphrase a recent Congressional inquiry "what is the possibility that someone will make a similar attack or attempt to make a similar attack or might even be thinking about making a similar attack"? If we embark on this line of thinking and task Homeland Security to prevent all such future attacks then we can certainly expect that this great country of ours will become a paranoid police state with no liberty let alone privacy. And this is precisely what we are doing to a somewhat smaller scale by treating every act of terrorism (even those which caused no danage) as a 'potential' catastrophe. All the news media try to instill fear in the public, and slaesmen push for selling this or that gadgets (just imagine, how hard it would be to sell full-body scanners had it not been for the underwear bomber). But, if you say — cool down there aren't that many terrorists capable of doing anything significant — people will brand you as naive.
February 22, 2010 @ 5:22 am