Why Not Every Mass Murder Is Terrorism
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas attack in which least 58 people were killed and 515 injured, memes are circulating online suggesting that only brown or Muslim mass murderers are considered terrorists, while white people are considered mentally ill. While this may be how some media outlets present the facts, it it utterly false. Terrorism is carried out in the service of an ideology, not a label used depending on the ethnicity of the murderer.
“Terrorism is about motive and method to achieve that motive. It’s legally, and politically distinct from mass murder, genocide and other heinous crimes just like pedophilia is distinct from rape. We in the U.K. called the IRA terrorists. Just as we call ISIS terrorists now. It’s not about race or hating one religion more than another.“Terrorism is a distinct category because it’s about trying to terrorize a population to alter their ideological or political course. It is deliberately and rightly distinguished from mass murder even if the latter also (obviously) scares people. I bet you’ve never argued for redefining “genocide” to call it terrorism instead just because both also “terrorize” people. Nor have you probably advocated redefining torture as terrorism, though it obviously terrorizes the victim.”
In other words, terrorism is an act of violence carried out in pursuit of a political/ideological goal.
It is this distinction that matters, not the ideology or religion of the perpetrator, to differentiate terror attacks from mass shootings perpetrated by the mentally ill. This holds regardless of the specific ideology in question. Dylan Roof’s murder of nine African-Americans at a church in Charleston, Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 and Omar Mateen’s massacre of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Oklahoma were all examples of terrorist attacks carried out in the name of very different causes.
The fact that Roof was not charged with terrorism is, in this author’s opinion, a miscarriage of justice, given that he carried out the attack in pursuit of his political goal of inciting a racial war. It is perfectly possible for a white Christian to commit an act of ideological terrorism, just as it is possible for a Muslim with mental illness to carry out a mass shooting that has nothing to do with Islamic extremism at all.
An act of terror is defined by the motivation, not the race or religion, of the perpetrator.
Affirming this definition clearly would do a lot to detoxify the polarized debate about terrorism in the United States.
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