I just ran across this backgrounder on “American Militant Extremists” by the Council on Foreign Relations.
I wanted to flag this excerpt for everyone:
Not all politically motivated violence qualifies as terrorism (for instance, the FBI and some terrorism experts did not regard the Unabomber, who says his antimodern beliefs were behind a seventeen-year mail-bombing campaign, as a terrorist), nor do all groups that espouse extremist ideas turn to terrorist acts. Experts do not consider all political assassinations or hate crimes to be terrorist attacks…
Ok, so let’s get this straight. Sometimes murdering people for political purposes is not terrorism. And sometimes destroying property, but not harming any life, is terrorism.
So how do we decide when crime is terrorism? If we judge by the Council on Foreign Relations’ website, all that matters is ideology: the “non-partisan” group has sections on the page for “left-wing domestic terrorism”
and the Earth Liberation Front, but conveniently leaves out right wing militias, anti-abortion groups, and the Ku Klux Klan.