I think that terrorists are people who kill for ideological reasons. This means, if course, that they are mentally healthy and of age because they need to have actual ideas to kill ideologically. It also means that they only kill strangers because otherwise ideas are simply a shield for personal resentments.
15 responses to “The Definition of Terrorism”
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“This means, if course, that they are mentally healthy.”
Sane terrorists like the leaders of ISIS attract HORDES of psychopaths, confused young people, and mentally defective hangers-on who don’t think rationally about anything, but gladly kill at the leaders’ bidding.
You may not consider this category of people technically terrorists, but if they further the ideological goals of the leaders, the practical effect on the attacked population is the same.
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I consider them all terrorists but I don’t consider them mentally ill. Once they got into a group, organized, worked together, what greater sign does one need that they are perfectly healthy?
Compare that with the yesterday’s fellow who in 3 hours didn’t manage to turn the car around and drive off.
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“yesterday’s fellow who in 3 hours didn’t manage to turn the car around and drive off.”
Er, the woman was doing the driving. 🙂 Have you considered the possibility that they were still masked and in tactical gear after three hours because they were on the way to a second target when they were caught?
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I can’t imagine a woman like that having a will of her own. That’s not why people import mail order brides from 3rd world countries.
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But that’s why many mail-order brides get married. Maybe she was an intelligent gold digger who was originally looking for a free pass to American citizenship.
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Actually, there’s some evidence that this woman that you believe “had no will of her own” was in fact the “black widow” behind the whole plot:
“HEADLINE OF NEWS ARTICLE: Investigators probe whether wife radicalized husband before San Bernardino massacre.
Lede below title: FBI investigate Al Qaeda link to San Bernardino suspects.
Federal investigators believe there is a “very serious” possibility that Tashfeen Malik, one of two shooters who murdered 14 people and wounded 17 others in San Bernardino, Calif. Wednesday, radicalized her husband and co-assailant, county restaurant inspector Syed Farook, Fox News has learned.
Investigators also believe that the couple had planned a second attack after the shooting at a social service center for the disabled when they were killed in a shootout with local authorities approximately two miles away.”
(Note my prescient suggestion a couple of posts above about this possibility of this second attack? 🙂
Come on, Clarissa, don’t underestimate the viciousness and cunning of your own gender when it comes to taking the lead in situations like this!
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Wasn’t this his workplace that he left in a huff, angry over something?
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Trump knows.
“It looks like another case. We’ve got a lot of bad things going on. Radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump said outside his soon-to-be-opened Washington Hotel at the Old Post Office.
“Take a look. I mean, you look at the names; you look at what’s happened. You tell me.”
“I think it was terrorism,” he later added.
Regardless of the truth, people will use this to justify their narrative.
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I have a hard time believing it’s terrorism simply because of the location of the attack. Has anyone been to San Bernadino? It’s small, economically depressed, and of no symbolic interest. Other terrorist attacks have happened in cities that people know of and are connected to (Paris, New York, Boston, Washington D.C.) and at places of some popular interest (soccer match, marathon, the Pentagon.) This is a town that very few people of heard of at a government building of no strategic or popular interest. It’s like having a terrorist attack at the DMV in Gary Indiana. I just don’t think this is terrorism. At least not in any organized sense.
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Yes. I think these are confused, lonely, unstable people who concocted this horrible plan between the two of them. Obviously, this doesn’t make the crime any less horrible.
And imagine that poor baby. What a tragedy.
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“I think these are confused, lonely, unstable people who concocted this horrible plan between the two of them. Obviously, this doesn’t make the crime any less horrible.”
Yes. I agree. That’s what I think. And the thought of the baby is heartbreaking.
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Evelina, I agreed with you, but then I thought… But: what if we think not in terms of structured [terrorist] organizations, where leaders give direct orders? Imagine a more loose structure, where the grunts do not know the leaders (and cannot betray them), and it is simply enough for the grunts to believe that they are doing a good deed by taking 14 while losing 2? And that can strike anywhere, also in the places of no symbolic importance, so that no one is safe anywhere? Literally anywhere?..
Imagine the next shooting actually happening at the DMV in Gary, Indiana. And so on. And then some minuteman characters taking revenge and killing some Muslims or burning a mosque… Thereby inducing more recruits. Recruits for all sides, actually.
By the way, I suspect the government is downplaying it not out of political correctness, as some Republicans suggest, but out of fear of the above scenario.LikeLike
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Unstable, angry people who want to die but in a way that fills their deaths with an imagined meaning can, indeed, happen anywhere. The “meaning” they choose to attach themselves to varies according to their personal hangups and fixations – abortion, black parishioners, Islam, singing balloons with glasses. Such people always existed but as we see less warfare in which they normally perish, we’ll see them more in “civilian” life.
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Well there are a lot of reports of him self-radicalizing so my guess is that this is a narcissistic rage murder (with religion being used as cover/excuse).
My guess is that one of them was the driving force behind the rage but until we get more info (which will probably never surface) there’s no telling which one was in the driver’s seat.
If I had to guess, I’d probably guess the wife since his newfound religious fervor apparently happened after getting married or it might be that marriage triggered something awful that had been lurking in him and brought it up to the surface.
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“my guess is that this is a narcissistic rage murder (with religion being used as cover/excuse)”
- That’s what I think, too.
“it might be that marriage triggered something awful that had been lurking in him and brought it up to the surface”
- That’s classic folie a deux. Two disturbed people meet, and the result is much worse than anything they could have come up with individually.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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