Well, I’m from Israel, and I called it a terrorist attack the moment I heard of it.
I can also remember that Americans have suffered terrorist attacks of a sort Israelis have never seen, and I hope to God never will.
A silly point perhaps but I’ll throw this out.
IMO it wasn’t an attack on all of society. And not in a “public” place (yes I know). Or an attack on our basic infrastructure or the government itself.
So a mild no vote on “terrorism” here.
The morning after the attack my Twitter feed was filled with insistence on the word “terrorist,” and pre-emptive (somewhat blinkered) outrage that the word wasn’t being used (I say pre-emptive because so few facts at the time were known, and because it had been used in mainstream sources regardless).
I was annoyed at the semantic quibbling and still don’t know what is gained or lost by using the word or not using it; I’m not trying to take a side, I just mean – if we all generally know what the facts are, what difference does it make if we call it a hate crime or terrorism?
It’s more annoying to me that people want to minimize the racist nature of the crime, or deny (as some have done here on this board) that Roof’s racism is due to racist culture, insisting that he’s some freakish outlier.
I don’t really care one way or another about the T word. Since 9/11/01 it’s been used so much, argued about so much, and I honestly don’t know what the point is. If there is any, it seems to imply that terrorism allies a criminal with a political faction, an actual terror group, as opposed to an ideology. If that’s the case, then saying it’s terrorism is not an opinion, it is a factual statement that has to be proven.
If that’s not the case, if you just want to make projections about the intent of the criminal, so be it. He’s a terrorist. Not sure why it’s so important to use the word, but sure. He’s a terrorist. As if there can be some way to shade a mass murder of unarmed people so we understand how REALLY awful it is.
FWIW I don’t call him a terrorist, but that’s because I don’t really use the word at all.
Some guy on Twitter with a million followers tried to take umbrage over the word “tragedy.” And of course was RTd a million times by equally outraged people. FTR there is nothing in the word “tragedy” that precludes it being a crime, it is not a word like Perry’s “accident” that implies it was unavoidable or a mistake. To try and shame reporters for using neutral, accurate language is stupid and pointless and self-serving. Nothing but someone angling for RTs by introducing fresh umbrage.
There’s enough here to be upset about in the actual act; no need to squabble about word choice based on made-up idiosyncratic definitions.
Non-Muslims generally need to use bombs to be called terrorists (e.g. McVeigh, Breivik). Muslim acts may be called terrorism if they use a gun (e.g. Ford Hood). I can’t remember how the media reacted to the Washington sniper. Black American guy, no bombs, Nation of Islam isn’t exactly like Middle East Islam, but he changed his name to Muhammad. I think a decent amount of people consider him a terrorist now, but I’m not sure.
I think a lot of people don’t call random singular acts terrorism. They want terrorists to be part of a larger organization.
Do people consider the Unabomber a terrorist? He had a whole ideology behind his methods.
The number of stories about Ted Kazynski without the word “terrorst” exceeds the number of those that do use the word, but by a small margin. But I don’t think the non-use of the word is some kind of racist tilt.
Well Dylann Roof had a political agenda, and that is the criteria of a terrorist to use violence to bring about a political agenda. So with that measure he qualifies.
Btw……………last sentence of the 1st paragraph of the OP. Anyone else catch that? Raised my eyebrow on the insensitive nature of that statement.
I thought it slightly ironic, but the phrase originally meant “spade” as “shovel”, without racist intent. It was only in 20th century that “spade” came to mean “black person”, and that’s pretty much faded away, hasn’t it?
Be a shame to lose a useful phrase like “call a spade a spade”. “Niggardly”, I guess we could do without.
A mild vote for terrorism here.
While there was a big racist component in the attack, if it was just racism he would had targeted people he knew or more local to him black groups, if the early reports I saw are accurate the confessed killer was reported to ask about Senator Clementa Pinckney, I do think that the killer was aware that Pinckney’s bill to require police to wear cameras was passed and was signed into law on June 10.
IMHO the convination of Roof seeing one big racist talking point taking a beating (the one that typically goes as ‘the minorities are always responsible for the high number of arrests and stops they encounter and the police and authorities are always right if they go deadly’) and that one way to deal with the problem was in part thanks to the efforts of a black politician that “should not be there” (how dare he demonstrate that people like him can be smart and politically active?), was one big factor on why the senator was one of the targets; as it was the church targeted that represent and continues to be not only a place for worship but a place for social activism.
So yes, to me it is very likely that one big factor was “an attack on our basic infrastructure or the government itself”.
like
The public place thing resonates. Also I don’t think Roof has any kind of agenda beyond something he literally smoked up.
I already used that joke in another thread this week. Board rules require one month between uses. I don’t know how jokes about Donald Trump’s hair get a pass. Pit thread to come.
Well, as I pointed before I do think racism was a big reason, but if that was just so then he had plenty of targets in his neighbourhood; besides the targets being black, Roof choose also the very same people that were more ‘insulting’ to his ideology, namely a minority group that was smarter than him and with political power to make sure that his “dreams” stayed crushed.
Why are those qualifiers for terrorism? It was an attack on civilians in order to incite a race war. If that ain’t terrorism, I don’t know what is.
So Charles Manson was a terrorist too? I just thought he was a nut case.
He thought it was (apparently from the news facts so far).
Does anybody not nuts think thats what the result would be?
Am I a terrorist for doing something bad because of my thinking or because of my actions?
I don’t recall what motive Manson had, but “terrorist” and “nut case” are not mutually exclusive.
Fwiw, I think I prefer ‘modern day lynching’ to ‘terrorism’, it feels right to me.
Terrorism has a lot of definitions, legal and non-legal. Depending on how the facts shake out, this probably meets some of them. To me the more important question is not whether it fits whatever definition of terrorism we want to use, but whether calling it terrorism leads to good results or not.
The terrorism label ought to be equally applied to white perpetrators and non-white ones. And calling it terrorism may well get more attention and resources paid to the issue of white supremacy. But I think using the terrorism narrative, as it currently exists, is a dangerous path. The real world consequences of calling this terrorism are mostly hysteria and a bunch of constitutional violations that don’t do much to prevent future attacks. I don’t want warrantless phone tapping of the KKK as a response to this, for example. What I want is social momentum in support of trying to end white supremacy in all of its manifestations.
This poignant example of white supremacy should motivate us to ask whether and how our culture abetted it, and whether there are other instances of racism we can stomp out with changes in policy. I don’t think we get to that place of dialogue and leadership by putting this in the category of terrorism, which puts him into a category that, as we’ve seen in the last decade-and-a-half, does not lead to especially rational, non-hysterical discussion and action.
[Former] Major Nidal Malik Hasan of the US Army murdered 13 people and injured 30 more at Ft. Hood back in 2009. Despite there being some good evidence suggesting that it was terrorism, he was Muslim, and non-white he was never charged with anything related to terrorism nor was his crime classified as such. So I’m not sure it’s always about whether or not the attacker is white.