The Austin bomber was caught last week after a frantic and scary two weeks of attempts to find him. Now it is time for critics to use this incident to score political points by calling Republicans and Americans racist. At the Daily Kos, Dean Obeidallah argued that the way we talk about the bomber indicates white privilege and racism. He contended that if a Muslim detonated six bombs over the course of a few weeks, he would be called a terrorist.
The white bomber in Austin, however, gets the benefit of the doubt—supposedly because of white America’s racism—and is called “troubled” instead of a terrorist. But the strict definition of terrorism shows that the bomber’s lack of ideology justifies the media’s avoidance of the label, and this becomes another example of how many liberals use words like terrorism to shame their enemies.
Terrorism has a very specific but still contested definition. The contested part is mainly regarding whether or not state actors can commit terrorism. Many Arab countries seek this addition to indict the Israeli army for their strikes on Palestinian terrorist groups.
The generally agreed upon definition is the unlawful use of force against persons or property in order to inspire fear and political or social change. Thus, with that definition, without an avowed political motive, the Austin bomber committed criminal violence and not terrorism. In the case of Muslim bombers, there are usually explicit ties to terrorist groups, some kind of link on social media, or even the direct confession of the bomber that he was acting as a soldier on behalf of a radical Muslim ideology.
That is why the FBI points to the December 2015 shooting in San Bernardino as an example of terrorism, but does not list the October 2017 Las Vegas shooting. It wasn’t because one shooter was dark-complected and the other was white, but because investigators in Las Vegas still haven’t determined a motive, while the San Bernardino shooter was almost a textbook case of somebody radicalized by extremist Muslim ideology.
The Austin bomber left a rather long confession that didn’t mention any radical ideology. Without that ideology, he is simply a disturbed individual who harmed and killed people. The media isn’t avoiding terrorism because they are biased towards Muslims or the white privilege of the Austin bomber. This is actually a rare case where I feel like praising the media for the accurate coverage of the issue.
In contrast, liberals have shown again and again in the last month that they care about scoring political points using overcharged rhetoric like terrorism. To cite just one out of many examples, Senator Malloy and others regularly call the NRA a “terrorist organization.” Many liberals want to use the word “terrorist” to stigmatize opponents they don’t like, such as the NRA. But these labels are not accurate and only inflame the conversation and obscure the danger we face from real terrorists.
To answer the question then, it takes zero bombs to call somebody a terrorist if there are clear links to terrorist groups and ideology, and a thousand bombs wouldn’t qualify somebody as a terrorist if those links are lacking. It has nothing to do with race, except for those that are obsessed with it.
