Semantic Vandalism cont…
(By the way, for those who don’t know it George Will used the phrase recently and I like it a lot)
Tapped addresses the growing cacophony of calling the sniper a terrorist. He may have been, but I think the question is still open. He held some Anti-American views, but it isn’t clear that is his motivation. Terrorism is violence directed at civilians to further political goals. Maybe he had some political goal he was trying to achieve here, but he certainly didn’t make it known. This should come out in the investigation, but it seems he was on some sort of psychotic trip with his statements about being God.
The danger of using terrorism to describe crimes that aren’t terrorism is it debases the language and the debate. If he wasn’t a terrorist we need to know how to respond to such threats given his motivations. If he was a terrorist–even a demented one with no ties, we need to know that too. Most of the garbage being spewed around the net on the subject uses inuendo instead of evidence and is quite Orwellian in how it uses the language to redefine what terrorism is. As TAPPED points out, Andrew Cunane may have terrorized people, but he wasn’t a terrorist.
The Matt Hale disciple who went on a rampage in Illinois and Indiana that included Ricky Byrdsong was a terrorist, if a demented one who also fits the category of spree killer. The Matt Hale disciple example is especially telling in this case. Hale considers himself a white Christian minister and spews hatred towards those of another race. That was clearly an isolated incident of terrorism by a fruitcake acting on his own tied to a small, cultlike religious group. Strangely enough, Matt Hale makes Farakhan seem kinda normal.
911 changed a lot of things. Foremost it changed our ability to reason and rationally evaluate potential risks. Instead of looking at the facts of a situation, many automatically search for a connection to Islamists no matter how tenuous. I fail to see any lesson to learn or behavior to change that is different than what we should have learned from the Matt Hale disciple case (I like keeping Hale’s name in the forefront so people remember who was behind the guy). Can anyone provide me a different lesson to learn?
More and more the form of argument from the one note wonders in blogland is that people who don’t follow their line of reasoning don’t get it. The problem is they can’t coherently argue what it is in this case. What changes if the sniper has a political point of view?