Who Exactly Is A Terrorist? What Exactly Is A Terrorist Act? What Exactly Is Terrorism?
On Thursday February 18, 2010, a white man, an American citizen, Andrew Joseph Stack flew his plane into the Internal Revenue Service building in Texas. Prior to embarking on this heinous and dastardly act, the man also maliciously set his home ablaze in wanton destruction.
Andrew Joseph Stack went out in in a flame not of glory, but rather ingloriously. But his murderous terrorist act were under reported in very terse tenses, such as did The Wall Street Journal which reported the blood lust terrorist act as “Tax Protester Crashes Plane Into IRS Office” and then proceeded to caption the terrorist’s picture, as “An undated photo of Andrew Joseph Stack, the plane’s pilot.”
I find the label which was appended by The Wall Street Journal rather revolting in the most egregiously offensive way. A bloodthirsty terrorist engaging in murderous and catastrophic bombing of human beings is a protester, a tax protester? Where was his placard? In the gas tank of his plane? Andrew Joseph Stack is just another Gandhi, King or Mandela? Why such so benign a description, almost endearing and affecting! Poor protester!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315004575073401102945506.html?mod=rss_com_mostcommentart#
How frightened do people have to be or get? How many people have to have been murdered? How much in dollar terms would have to have been destroyed in arson, vandalism and maiming, for using an airplane as weapons of attack against a federal building, to earn its proper name, terrorism by terrorists who are suicide bombers as Andrew Joseph Stack clearly was? Or is he merely a protester and Montana Free Man? He is just a Libertarian with an aversion to paying his fair share of taxes? All brand new concepts of terrorism as protest? Does the offending person have to be White, Black, Brown, Christian, Muslim and from Western nations? Arab or Persian World or Afghan or Pakistani or Palestinian, Israeli or American to qualify as a terrorist engaged in terrorist acts also known as terrorism?
Who is a terrorist with a grudge and who is a protester with a grudge? What qualifies as legitimate grudge? Tax Policy or Foreign Policy?
We can now imagine that Khalid Sheik Mohammed at his eventual trial, arguing that September 11, 2001 attackers were merely using tools of civil aviation as instrument of protests against American Foreign Policy in the Middle East? The most brilliantly incandescent defense lawyers could not have come up with this brilliant masterstroke!
Does this not make every fair minded person wonder about this terrorism thing? As many questions now arise. Would an American citizen whose religion is Islam and with a name quite unlike Andrew Joseph Stack, who misbehaves in the same be similarly labeled as a tax protester?
Are definitions of terrorism and much of everything else in life, just about nationality and passport colors? Are some too quick to label others, while agonizing, pontificating and embellishing “appropriate” labels for themselves?
Is nationality and religion the determinant of who is labeled a terrorist and those who may not be so labeled? MOSSAD is suspected of murdering a Palestinian in a hotel in Dubai, the murderers-terrorists are not being condemned loudly, we have sedate diplomatic language used which emphasizes politesse!
So here were have two separate events occurring on both sides of the Atlantic, with nationals of Israel and America involved. And the world sees a very terse and tepid responses, without the usual or prefabricated righteous indignation against blood sucking Islamo-Fascists who are without logic or reason and merely guided by unreason and promised monopoly over 70 virgins! With nothing said of daily hardships and suffering and the innate desire in all humans, to be politically free from occupation, domination, marginalization and subjugation. Being occupied must be good for native peoples? No? Native peoples only care for religions and 100 virgins! We can do whatever we want, take whatever we want, sans lands and oil, but, just stay away from religion and the virgins? Ha!
Considering this MOSSAD efficiently executed assignment in Dubai, and the benign act of this tax protester in Texas, I have come to realize that I need a brand new definition for the term double standards as well as the definition for the word known as obfuscation
All of these also makes me wonder, what exactly, by way of heinous murders, violence, malicious destruction of property, private and public, can be determined to be terrorist acts?
If maiming of others, murders, and wanton destruction is not terrorism, perhaps we do need a definition, a new definition of . who is a terrorist, who is a terrorist and what the heck is terrorism?
A person with a grudge, flying a plane into a building with federal employees in it, is a terrorist, say McCall. Andrew Joseph Stack had a grudge, a murderous rage, flew his weapon into a federal building, killed someone in there and caused significant damage to the Internal Revenue Service building!
A terrorist is such person with violent murderous rage, with weapons and when such person undertakes substantial and significant steps, she is a terrorist engaged in terrorism, be he American, Saudi Arabian, Palestinian or Nigerian. In fighting terrorists and terrorism, we must recognize that there are virtues and vices worldwide. Fighting terrorists and terrorism, therefore requires a universal application of rules and terminologies to persons, White, Black, Arabian, or whether they are Mutallab, McVeigh, Mohammed or presciently, whether they are Andrew Joseph Stack, tax protester, engineer and pilot!
4 comments
Akinola, you are so fixated at attacking me, to the extent that you do not even notice the fact that my new post in response to your comments… is actually an article written by Glenn Greenwald?
You come across as crying louder that the bereaved.
You seem to be unwilling to even re-evaluate your position, despite new information or facts and evidences?
We all LOVE AMERICA!
In your dubious attempt to drown the real issue at hand, you decided to lump together a bunch of other issues in an effort to extricate yourself from your own self-designed ideological trap. But then again you are a self-described lawyer!
As a lawyer, you must be familiar with the saying: “When fact is not on your side you argue the law. When law is not on your side you argue the fact. And when neither is on your side you pound the table.” Your effort up there amounts to nothing more than the pounding of the table! But still I am going to accomodate you by responding to your issues one at a time.
Let’s first take the issue of taxes. Stack hated IRS probably because he did not want to pay his taxes. Right this moment, there are two high-ranking liberal democrats by the names of Geitner and Rangel who also didn’t pay their taxes. If you can name for me two equivalent Conservative Republicans, past and or present, who didn’t pay their taxes, we will move to your next issue. If not, you will have to admit that Stack’s behavior is akin to that of those two liberals. And that makes him a liberal not a tea-partier as you suggested!
How about it honorable Adujie?
Terrorism: the most meaningless and manipulated word
By Glenn Greenwald
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Glenn Greenwald
Friday, Feb 19, 2010 07:20 EST
Terrorism: the most meaningless and manipulated word
By Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)
Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack’s worldview contained elements of the tea party’s anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with “the Left” (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America’s poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:
I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual” . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.
Despite all that, The New York Times’ Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of “terrorism,” even though — as Dave Neiwert ably documents — it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term. The issue isn’t whether Stack’s grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC’s Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are “a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he’s an American citizen.” Fox News’ Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: “I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?,” to which Herridge replied: “they mean terrorism in that capital T way.”
All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: “a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.” That’s why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist: he’s not a Muslim and isn’t acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the “definition.” One might concede that perhaps there’s some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized: it’s not “terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way.” We all know who commits terrorism in “that capital T way,” and it’s not people named Joseph Stack.
Contrast the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to Muslims. If a Muslim attacks a military base preparing to deploy soldiers to a war zone, that person is a Terrorist. If an American Muslim argues that violence against the U.S. (particularly when aimed at military targets) is justified due to American violence aimed at the Muslim world, that person is a Terrorist who deserves assassination. And if the U.S. military invades a Muslim country, Muslims who live in the invaded and occupied country and who fight back against the invading American army — by attacking nothing but military targets — are also Terrorists. Indeed, large numbers of detainees at Guantanamo were accused of being Terrorists for nothing more than attacking members of an invading foreign army in their country, including 14-year-old Mohamed Jawad, who spent many years in Guantanamo, accused (almost certainly falsely) of throwing a grenade at two American troops in Afghanistan who were part of an invading force in that country. Obviously, plots targeting civilians for death — the 9/11 attacks and attempts to blow up civilian aircraft — are pure terrorism, but a huge portion of the acts committed by Muslims that receive that label are not.
In sum: a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army, are Terrorists. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a Real Terrorist with a capital T — not the kind who should be tortured and thrown in a cage with no charges and assassinated with no due process. Nor are Christians who stand outside abortion clinics and murder doctors and clinic workers. Nor are acts undertaken by us or our favored allies designed to kill large numbers of civilians or which will recklessly cause such deaths as a means of terrorizing the population into desired behavioral change — the Glorious Shock and Awe campaign and the pummeling of Gaza. Except as a means for demonizing Muslims, the word is used so inconsistently and manipulatively that it is impoverished of any discernible meaning.
All of this would be an interesting though not terribly important semantic matter if not for the fact that the term Terrorist plays a central role in our political debates. It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S. Government does. Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions, military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance, obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all justified by the claim that it’s only being done to “Terrorists,” who, by definition, have no rights. Even worse, one becomes a “Terrorist” not through any judicial adjudication or other formal process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the Executive Branch. The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and that’s the end of that: uncritical followers of both political parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he’s a Terrorist (by which they actually mean: he’s been accused of being one, though that distinction — between presidential accusations and proof — is not one they recognize).
If we’re really going to vest virtually unlimited power in the Government to do anything it wants to people they call “Terrorists,” we ought at least to have a common understanding of what the term means. But there is none. It’s just become a malleable, all-justifying term to allow the U.S. Government carte blanche to do whatever it wants to Muslims it does not like or who do not like it (i.e., The Terrorists). It’s really more of a hypnotic mantra than an actual word: its mere utterance causes the nation blindly to cheer on whatever is done against the Muslims who are so labeled.
UPDATE: I want to add one point: the immediate official and media reaction was to avoid, even deny, the term “terrorist” because the perpetrator of the violence wasn’t Muslim. But if Stack’s manifesto begins to attract serious attention, I think it’s likely the term Terrorist will be decisively applied to him in order to discredit what he wrote. His message is a sharply anti-establishment and populist grievance of the type that transcends ideological and partisan divisions — the complaints which Stack passionately voices are found as common threads in the tea party movement and among citizens on both the Left and on the Right — and thus tend to be the type which the establishment (which benefits from high levels of partisan distractions and divisions) finds most threatening and in need of demonization. Nothing is more effective at demonizing something than slapping the Terrorist label onto it.
I am not surprised at the conclusion you and those like you have reached concerning the story you referenced. I am not surprised that you “find the label which was appended by The Wall Street Journal rather revolting in the most egregiously offensive way.” In fact I am not surprised at any conclusion you reach on anything because no matter what it is, you will always be loyal to your disjointed marxist view of issues and events.
But did you notice anything peculiar in your comparison of Islamic terrorism with the Timothy McVeigh’s kind of behavior by the liberal Andrew Joseph Stack?
The first significant thing you should have noticed as a lawyer is the fact that Mr. Stack did not attack a foreign country with his personal plane. He attacked his own country and his own people!
It would be fine with me, and hopefully with the rest of the civilized world, if Islamic terrorists would limit their terrorism to their own homelands and to their own people rather than terrorize the whole friggin world for hell knows what! And if they do that, we will cease referring to them as terrorists. Instead, we will refer to them as angry mullahs if you get my drift.
The second factor you should have thought of, if not noticed, is that Mr. Stack’s action was rooted in secular matter while that of Islamonazis is rooted in religion with a heavenly reward for terrorism!