After the shooting rampage yesterday in California, I saw a tweet from CNN quoting the FBI as saying that it is “unclear if the shooting was terrorism.”
I always ask the “war or terror” people what terrorism is. They usually say violence for political gain. Well, if that’s true, then everything the US Army does is “terrorism”.
The assertion that it is “unclear if the shooting was terrorism” proves one thing though. That the real meaning of “terrorism” is when Muslims murder people for religious reasons. Otherwise, it’s just “crime”.
The Jewish Libertarian 
If it’s just a crime, then justice says we must find and deal with the perpetrators. We have a long established mechanism for that, from self-defense, to police, courts, and prisons.
If, on the other hand, it is terrorism, our governments can justify all forms of overreach. More spying. More police. More military. More arbitrary power. Trump says we must deal with ‘terrorism’ by punishing the perpetrator’s families in the belief that ‘terrorists’, unlike criminals, are not concerned with their own punishment, but will be sensitive to the killing of their friends and family. He is wrong. Injustice will breed more ‘terrorism’ and unless injustice is ended, the spiral of violence will end up with no freedom, no peace, and no safety for anyone.
Recently a rancher and his son were convicted of ‘terrorism’ because they set a fire to grasslands (one of the western states) to clear underbrush to improve grazing for their cattle. The fire got away from them and burned about a hundred acres of very remote land that the government says they own as a wildlife refuge. This was the topper to a long running dispute between the rancher and the Federal Government over grazing rights, and the Fed Gov reached into it’s bag of laws passed after the Oklahoma City Bombing and justified charging the rancher with ‘terrorism’ (because it involved damaging government property through the use of fire).
Terrorism is a catch-all….and it will someday catch us all.
Damn straight. Bravo. By the way, I found a piece on Bloomberg showing that Zuckerberg’s $45B “donation” is really just a tax haven through an LLC. Haha.