Conservatives would love to paint the Fort Hood shooting as a “terrorist attack”, and thus a “terrorist attack” on US soil while on Obama’s watch. However, the Fort Hood shooting can’t qualify as a terrorist attack. For one, the gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, acted alone. This wasn’t a coordinated effort by some organization. He picked up his rifle and open fired. And that leads to two, there is no target to go after in retaliation to, of course, justify the “War on Terror“, because he indeed acted alone. There is no country to go after, terrorist cell nor militia group.
Now of course, the counter argument is that he was a religious fanatic with ties to extremist groups. However, if you are one who is about to make this counter argument are you sure you really want to go down this slippery slope? Can anyone think of any other fatal shooting attacks that have happened in this country, say within the last year perhaps? Well, there’s the Tiller murder, the fatal Holocaust Memorial shooting, the Immigration Office killings, and the slaughter of church members who attended a church that accepted gay relationships. In all these cases, the shooters were religious fanatics with ties to extremist groups. So, by the logic of the counter argument, all these shooters in these cases are also “terrorists”. Well, they are of course, but not by the military’s definition of a terrorist. I’m all for changing the definition of what a real terrorist is. If all it takes is labeling someone a religious fanatic with ties to extremist groups a “terrorist” that should put a majority of the right wingers behind bars.
Of course the counter counter argument is all the infringement of our civil rights when we start locking away everyone who incites Nazism whenever Obama’s name is mentioned (by our own elected Congressmen no less), which I am not in favor of. I would miss that daily entertainment of those individuals marginalizing themselves and making sure their side is less likely to ever win an election again. And as most counter counter arguments do, they bring us back full circle, to the fact then that the Fort Hood shooting was not a terrorist attack. Just some far right religious fanatic whack job with extremist ties on yet another violent rampage.
Although I may fall somewhere left of the middle, I am so glad that the “extremist” far left represents pacifism and diplomacy, versus the murder and hate from the “extremist” far right.
