I don’t know that geographic determinations alone, as you seemed to suggest, are a good classification system (other than perhaps domestic vs international). For example, some recent examples of Islamic-extremism-motivated “terrorism” are also “domestic”. The Fort Hood shooter was born in Virginia. The male shooter from San Bernardino was born in Chicago. The Pulse nightclub shooter was born in New York.
Other departments use similar language, but this one is the most thorough. AIUI, if this guy were targeting black people because he dislikes black people–even if he later expanded his targets–that would comprise a “social objective,” which is one of the FBI criteria.
I’ll wait and see, but this sure as hell looks like terrorism to me at the moment.
Their statement - “no apparent nexus to terrorism at this time” - implies that they aren’t even considering the possibility that his act itself may be considered terrorism. As if “terrorism” is, by definition, something done by terrorist organizations.
Come on, now. We all know that a violent act counts as terrorism if one of two things is true:
(a) it fits a subtle and difficult-to-quantify set of conditions involving motivation and desired outcome
or
(b) the perpetrator was Muslim
Seriously, I don’t think the problem is that we’re insufficiently willing to label violent crimes as terrorism when they’re committed by whites, I think the problem is that we automatically label violent crimes as terrorism when committed by Muslims, and then the more fair-minded among us want to apply that same standard to crimes committed by whites, at which point the word loses all meaning.
In any case, it’s a semantic dispute whose importance is blown way out of proportion. For instance, the San Bernadino shooter was the example that I think is most likely a non-terrorist killer who was labelled a terrorist because of his background. And it was being done as some sort of reflexive labelling to score some abstruse political point or other, not because deciding whether it was or was not terrorism had any practical impact on whatever law enforcement steps would come next.
I haven’t followed the story closely… the impression I remember having at the time was that the perpetrators were planning to attack a more traditional terrorist target (ie, a power plant or something), and then basically got in a big ugly argument with someone at work, so just brought all their terrorist supplies to the work party and started killing people there.
But that was (I admit) only a casual opinion formed on the basis of fairly early reports.
That said, I think this kind of perfectly encapsulates my point. The following two statements are inarguably true:
(1) There are lots of Muslims committing terroristic violence all around the world. Muslim extremism is a real and pressing problem
(2) The killers in San Bernadino were Muslims
So what if we found out with absolute certainty that the San Bernadino killers were in fact just “garden variety” disgruntled office workers, motivated purely by whatever assholish tendencies cause “normal” workplace massacres? Or what if we found out with absolute certainty that they were motivated entirely by religiously-motivated extremist ideology, and intended the attack to strike a blow against western decadence, ie, textbook terrorism. Neither one of those conclusions affects the truth of (1) at all.
Yes, my aside about the San Bernardino killers was not intended as a rebuttal of (I think) your central conclusion: that “deciding whether it was or was not terrorism” does not have “any practical impact on whatever law enforcement steps would come next.” I agree with that conclusion.
Three packages exploded when they were moved, and one exploded on a conveyor belt.
It looks as though the police rammed the bomber’s truck. I wonder of that is what set off the bomb in his car.
I’m not sure we’re understanding each other. Is it your contention that the Bernie Sanders supporter who took the radical step of trying to murder Congressional Republicans is actually on the “center-right” side of the political spectrum?