I’m one of the thankfully small percentage of Americans who’s seen the results of true terrorist violence firsthand, and it’s difficult to describe the horror. I’m not sure which sight has impacted me the most — was it the enormous bloodstains spreading across the desert ground? Was it the empty, blood-spattered children’s shoes? Or was it the site of a terrorist’s face, smashed by a fifty caliber bullet? For months after I came home from Iraq, I would sometimes see those shoes in my dreams. Other times, I’d see that horrible face. Terrorism is a gruesome, dreadful thing. What’s happening in Oregon is not terrorism.
There is an interesting urge on the Left to label every imaginable “right wing” criminal act terrorism. Doing so has the double benefit of making the right look scary and violent while also minimizing the danger of Islamic radicals. Doubt me? Cruise the web for nine seconds, and you’ll find multiple arguments that the right is deadlier than jihadists. There’s a racial element as well, with the Left asserting that people like the Bundys receive preferential treatment merely because they’re white — while black protesters are called “thugs” or worse.
Within hours after the Bundys’ takeover of a then-vacant federal building located in the middle of nowhere, the Washington Post ran a story that asked, “Why aren’t we calling the Oregon occupiers ‘terrorists’”? At that very moment, social media was aflame with accusations of terrorism, mocking the protesters as “Y’all Qaeda” or “Vanilla ISIS.” The Post observed:
When a group of unknown size and unknown firepower has taken over any federal building with plans and possibly some equipment to aid a years-long occupation — and when its representative tells reporters that they would prefer to avoid violence but are prepared to die — the kind of almost-uniform delicacy and the limits on the language used to describe the people involved becomes noteworthy itself.
It’s “noteworthy” only if a person could credibly compare the beheadings, shootings, and bombings of true terrorism — including true domestic terrorism like the Charleston church shooting — with a few men and women hanging out with rifles in an empty gift shop located miles from anywhere. This is defining terrorism down to an absurd degree. It’s hard to imagine a prosecutor making a credible terrorism case even under the U.S. Code’s broad definition:
(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.
Who is being intimidated and coerced, exactly? In fact, the protesters are going out of their way to say they don’t intend to threaten anybody. It’s unclear to me that they’ve even yet done anything “dangerous to human life.” The reporters swarming to talk to them are hardly in the grips of terror, and the “takeover” itself was more trespassing than “takeover.”
All this could change if the situation escalates, but for now it looks as if the opposite is happening. The FBI isn’t poised to storm the building, and the Bundys are signaling they may leave soon — if the community doesn’t want their assistance (it doesn’t).
When I made the case yesterday for civil disobedience on behalf of the Hammonds, I was not making the case for the Bundys’ tactics. I don’t care if they occupy the building until the inevitable zombie apocalypse, but if they communicate that they may be willing to shoot before they’re willing to leave, then they’ve crossed a bright line. Their message should be peaceful, period. With their rhetoric, however, they’ve squandered the opportunity to make a more potent statement, and that hurts the very cause (and family) they seek to help. But while they’re violating the law, they’re not terrorists, and that distinction is both morally and legally important. Let’s save the language of terror for the people who truly terrorize.