When Jared Lee Loughner walked into a town hall meeting and unceremoniously gunned down a Chief District Court Judge and a Congress Democrat in January this year, the most conspicuously absent word in public response was "terrorism".
Hilary Clinton went close, calling Loughner an "extremist" and drawing a parallel with extremism in the Middle East. But overwhelmingly, Loughner was deemed dismissed as crazy - much like Norway's Anders Behring Breivik who has now admitted to killing 90 people on the weekend.
Already you can see the rhetorical slide.
What began as an unambiguous act of terrorism is slowly becoming the work of a "lone gunman". It's not, in the words of a Norwegian police official, "Islamic-terror related", so he must be a "madman". Terrorism is appearing in some reports of this most recent tragedy - certainly more than it did in the Loughner case - but nowhere nearly as frequently as it does when the perpetrators aren't one of "us".
There's a problem here, and it has nothing to do with political correctness. It's not even simply about public language.
The problem is that the more we explain away acts of domestic terrorism as isolated cases of madness, the less capable we become of spotting it. Having realised the weekend's attacks in Norway weren't Islamist, we must do better than lazily assuming Breivik is just Norway's answer to Martin Bryant.Martin Bryant he is not. Bryant is a loner who massacred 35 people apparently as a way of getting attention: to "make everyone remember me".
Breivik is a committed political activist. His manifesto (which for the time being is on YouTube), if correctly attributed, makes this abundantly clear. It is deeply implausible that this was anything other than a textbook case of terrorism. It was fear-inducing violence by a non-state actor in the service of a political cause.
Understood this way, we can see that Breivik is far from an isolated case. This is clearest in America, where the phenomenon of "domestic terrorism" has been on the rise for the last three or four years. Here, I'm not talking about "homegrown" Islamist terrorism, which has also increased.
I'm talking about people who, crudely speaking, are like Breivik: white, male citizens with some or other political axe to grind in their own nation.In March this year, police arrested Kevin Harpham, a white supremacist and former soldier, for trying to bomb a Martin Luther King Jr parade in Washington state. He got as far as placing the bomb there. Six months earlier, an environmentalist named James J Lee was killed by police after he burst into the Discovery Channel's headquarters with explosives and a gun demanding it "broadcast to the world [its] commitment to save the planet". In February 2010 Joseph Stack flew a plane into an IRS building, killing himself and an IRS manager. Stack's suicide note raged against a range of things, including the US government's bailout of financial institutions and his ongoing problems with tax payments and debts.
I could go on. And on. These are not odd scattered plots. We're talking about dozens and dozens and dozens of them - most, thankfully, unsuccessful. Today's domestic terrorists are a broad bunch, as the FBI notes: "From hate-filled white supremacists. to highly destructive eco-terrorists. to violence-prone anti-government extremists. to radical separatist groups." And that is to say nothing of anti-abortion violence, which is quite common. These attacks don't get international headlines, or blanket domestic coverage. As a consequence, they don't generate the broad fear that Islamist terrorism does. But when they succeed, and they do, the dead are just as dead.
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