It WAS Terrorism -- What Do YOU Think?

Last June, I did the piece I thought I was going to write today.  When you have five deadlines a week, you have to research sometimes to make sure you're not repeating some brilliance from a year or three back.  And a year ago, apparently I did, sort of, enough to be taken aback but not so much as to avoid writing it again, sort of, today.

The point was brought back to me when a gunman shot up a part of Toronto, Canada, on the weekend, and the news report referred to the local authorities as not having determined as yet if the incident was "terrorism."

I immediately reacted by saying "Then what the heck else was it?", that is, that terrorism didn't depend entirely on the identification of the perpetrator. Then I got a text from my brother, saying the same thing and telling me to write that notion up.  That, of course, is when I discovered that I sort of had.

The difference is that the 2017 column was talking about it in the sense of political correctness, and the notion that "terrorism" meant that the perpetrator(s) had to have been practicing radical Islamist terrorism, and if we didn't yet know if the act was done by Islamists, well gee, we couldn't say "terror" lest we offend anyone.

Well, as I write this, the identity of the gunman who shot up the Greektown neighborhood is known, and he was a Muslim of some stripe, not yet identified as an Islamist.  And he is already dead and not talking.  But the incident certainly is understood.  And it seems quite apparent that (A) Canada's boasted-about gun laws didn't seem to have stopped this, and (B) the perpetrator was shooting at relatively unconnected people, whose presence on the street was enough to make them targets.

"Terrorism" is not really a difficult word to define.  It is an action intended to make people afraid, no matter what the motive.  Yes, the preponderance of such people are Islamists, because the rest of us don't advocate killing innocent people as a way to attract others to their way of worshiping God.  But not all of them are.

Charles Whitman, the shooter at the University of Texas many years ago, was frightening people, but he was a disturbed young man who was venting emotion and anger and very likely the effects of a brain tumor he did not know he had.  He was not trying to influence people by scaring them into doing something.  Was that terrorism?  An act of extreme violence, certainly, but not terrorism, I think.

So was Toronto terrorism or not?  And does it matter?

I think if I were the news reporter, I would be saying that it "certainly appears to have been an act of terrorism", and if it were to have turned out to be the rare act of a very disturbed person not in control of themselves, then I might not even have to feel like correcting myself.

The problem today is that we have conflated "terrorism" with "radical Islamist terrorism" to where the media are afraid to declare an act as the former out of fear of implying the latter.

Well, here is the thing.  Such acts are so predominantly the act of terrorists, that it seems perfectly reasonable and not at all risky to say early on that it "appears to have been a terrorist act" until proven otherwise.

Forty years or so ago, I remember seeing the late British comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a stage show that may have been "Good Evening", a 1970s series of comedy vignettes.  In one of them, Moore is playing a British detective being interviewed by a reporter (Cook) about a series of train robberies.

"We are absolutely certain", Moore says, "that we know who has perpetrated this awful crime."  Cook replies, "Please tell us, then, who that is!"  Moore then says, "These incidents are the work of thieves!"

Well, duh.  When you are reporting on an act that nine times out of ten is an act of terrorism, you really shouldn't be afraid to point out that it certainly appears to be an act of terrorism.

Amen.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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