The term “terrorism” can be a deceptive, misleading, power-mongering, unjust way of describing a hate crime. Such mislabeling pays off for some—like self-serving politicians, the corporate media, and the gun lobby. It does not help the victims of the hate crimes, whether they be people of a particular color, a particular gender, a particular religion, or a particular sexual orientation.
18 U.S.C. § 2331 defines “domestic terrorism” for purposes of Chapter 113B of the FBI Code in the following ways:
“‘Domestic terrorism’ means activities with the following three characteristics:
- Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
- Appear 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 (emphasis added); and
- Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.”
And here’s the FBI’s definition of “hate crime”:
“a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a ‘criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.’” (emphasis added)
So, let’s think about what happened in Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, and consider the extent to which it meets the criteria for terrorism or looks more like a hate crime. On that date, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, an American citizen born in Queens, New York, shot more than 100 people with an assault rifle and hand gun. Fifty of the victims died, making it the deadliest mass murder in US—more than twice the carnage inflicted when Adam Lanza shot 20 first graders and six adults to death at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.
When, sounding calm and collected, Mateen called 911 in the middle of his murderous spree, he claimed allegiance to the Islamic State and suggested he was revenging the killing of innocent civilians by American and Russian aircraft. He also claimed, falsely, to have explosives that he would strap to hostages and set off around the nightclub. (Maybe we shouldn’t believe every word he says.)
What do we know about Mr. Omar Mateen besides his having a Middle Eastern sounding name and being the son of immigrants from Afghanistan? From recent media stories, we learn he was an abusive husband often showing erratic behavior, he used racial, ethnic and sexist slurs, and talked about killing people; he expressed intolerance of homosexuals and had recently expressed disgust at seeing two men publicly kissing each other.
From a wikimedia article, we get a fuller psychological picture: As early as third grade, Mateen was verbally abusive, aggressive, and talked endlessly of violence and sex, a pattern that continued through elementary and secondary school, and beyond. He was put in special classes because of behavioral problems and conflicts with other students. He claimed to be the nephew of Osama bin Laden, and asserted that bin Laden had personally taught him to fire AK-47s. He was suspended from vocational school for fighting with other students, and later kicked out of a corrections officer training class because he threatened to bring a gun to class in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings in April of 2007.
And what do we know about mass murderers? According to Dr James Knoll, a leading forensic psychiatrist with special expertise in mass murderers:
“The mass murderer is an injustice collector who spends a great deal of time feeling resentful about real or imagined rejections and ruminating on past humiliations. He has a paranoid worldview with chronic feelings of social persecution, envy, and grudge holding…. The paranoia exists on a spectrum of severity. Some clearly do not meet criteria for any mental disorder and often may justify their acts on political or religious grounds.”
Only very recently, the FBI had thoroughly investigated Omar based on co-worker complaints concerning his behavior, and had found no evidence of terrorist connections despite his occasional rants about such connections. Perhaps, then, despite his lofty claims of terrorist connections, he is, like the vast majority of American mass murderers, not a domestic terrorist but another very angry, disturbed, and paranoid young man with a hatred for a particular group—in this case, homosexuals.
Why, then, call him a terrorist? In my view, it feeds the voracious hunger of the corporate media for stories that sell, gives unscrupulous politicians ammunition to fire at rivals who support nonviolent approaches to world problems, and helps expand the budget of the FBI .
Members of the LGBT community have increasingly been the victims of hate crimes in recent years.
Does labeling a hate crime as a terrorist attack and looking for connections with ISIS/ISIL lead to greater protection for and understanding of their community? Who benefits from equating hate crimes with terrorist attacks when there are any elements to the story that facilitate such links? What do you think?