Monthly Archives: August 2006

Hate Crimes & Terrorism

Referencing my article below, here’s another crime that won’t be classified as terrorism (and probably shouldn’t be) and it also won’t be classified as a “hate” crime (as was the crime committed by Naveed Afzal Haq in Seattle).

I agree with Betsy wholeheartedly about the classification of “hate” crimes. How does it make an assault or a murder more of an assault or a murder?

Person A kills Person B.

Scenario 1: Person A is a wife who just can’t stand her husband anymore. She’s really mad because he will not put the seat back down and he never picks up his dirty under shorts. She “hates” him.

Scenario 2: Person “A” is a member of one religious or ethnic group. Person “B” is member of another religious or ethnic group. Person A “hates” all persons of Person B’s religious or ethnic group.

Person B is just as dead. Murder one is murder one.

As Betsy says, “Why should motive (apart from self-defense) make a murder more or less heinous?”

When is Terrorism not Terrorism?

Terrorism isn’t terrorism when a Naveed Afzal Haq is charged with a hate crime for killing and wounding Jews at a Jewish center in Seattle. This after he announced, “I’m a Muslim American; I’m angry at Israel,”

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Terrorism isn’t terrorism when the Deputy Secretary of the UN, Mark Malloch Brown, says

that he does not think that Hezbollah, the Syrian- and Iranian-backed group currently fighting Israeli Defense Forces, is a terrorist organization.

“It’s not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism. Hezbollah employs terrorist tactics; it is an organization, however, whose roots historically are completely separate and different from Al Qaeda,” [emphasis mine] he said, according to a transcript of an interview.

And I think therein lies the problem. The press and the left seem to think that it’s terrorism only if Al Qaeda is involved. If Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Ladin aren’t involved, if Osama Bin Ladin isn’t pulling the strings or sending out the orders, then it isn’t terrorism. The press and the left had a very hard time even considering that Zarqawi was Al Qaeda in Iraq (because Al Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq dontcha know).

Somehow, the word terrorism for the left and the press is narrowly defined and limited to Al Qaeda. That needs to be changed. Terrorism knows no particular ideology or ethnic background. Currently the main force of terrorism is Islamofascists, but there are others. MS-13 comes to mind as one (see Michelle Malkin’s coverage of this group).

Thanks to Hang Right Politics for pointing me to the Malloch Brown story.

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