Of COURSE It Was Terrorism!

On Wednesday, a police officer was attacked and stabbed by an individual at the airport in beautiful Flint, Michigan.  A few hours afterward, while the initial reporting was of an "incident" at the airport and the details were coming out, the FBI declined, in a statement at 2pm local time, to say it was "terrorism."

Now, I thought as I heard that, that was a pretty silly thing for the FBI to say, and certainly to the point of making a released statement, to where they knew their selection of words was important.

What the heck was it then?

It will probably have turned out that it was an Islamist radical, but does that matter?  Suppose it was a Black Lives Matter type, one of those clowns who march down the streets of our cities chanting about wanting "dead cops" and wanting them "now."

Suppose it was one of them.  Is it not terrorism then?  What is the point of terrorism, or the point of actions that should be defined as terrorism?

I think it is pretty obvious.  When the victim of an attack is someone well-known to the perpetrator, like a spouse or drug-dealing associate or rival, well, that is not terrorism.  It's not meant to scare a third party or parties; it's not meant to change anyone's behavior except that of the victim.

Was the FBI trying to say that in this attack, they weren't sure if the perpetrator was an Islamist radical and, therefore, it couldn't have been "terrorism"?  Well, if that's the way the define terrorism, they're just flat-out wrong.  Pretty evidently the attacker didn't know the cop, and attacked him because he was a cop.

That means that the intended effect was to influence others, specifically to get people not to be cops because they might get attacked, right?  How much intuition does one have to have to figure this out?  Maybe the attacker also wanted to show the populace that his motives and his organization was stronger than the police, the symbols of the authority of the government.

Either way, if you are attacking someone to influence the behavior of others, it is terrorism and needs to be called that.

The FBI should have just said nothing at all, or just that they were investigating, period.  There's not a lot of need for them to say much early on, let alone give out a statement.  Obviously, once we hear that the attacker is named Achmed or Mohammed Something-or-Other, the people are smart enough to put two and two together and get four, or thereabouts.

Especially when, as in this case, multiple news sources reported that the attacker shouted "God is great!" in Arabic before stabbing the cop.  Know what I mean?

But the FBI decided not to say it was terrorism yet.

Well, here you go, FBI.  It was terrorism.  In this case, we know now it was surely radical Islamist terrorism, but even when you put the statement out you knew it was terrorism even if you didn't want to call it Islamist. 

There are other terrorists out there, and you don't do the protect-the-Muslims narrative any good by making the assumption, which your statement effectively did, that only Islamists can be terrorists.  Anyone attacking someone for the sake of the attack's impact on others is a terrorist.

PC PC PC PC ... when does it stop?

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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