According to the Bush administration, we are engaged in a War on Terrorism - a war which pits Western, democratic values against totalitarian religion. It is, in the words of some, a war for the survival of Western civilization. If this is true, however, then why do government officials have such odd definitions of what constitutes "terrorism"? On the one hand, the Secretary of Education has referred to the NEA as a "terrorist organization." On the other hand, a bombing in a government office in Arizona is not referred to as terrorism. What's going on here?

Dave Neiwert comments:

One can only imagine, of course, what the official and media reaction would have been if this were, say, the local Arizona immigration offices of Homeland Security that had been bombed instead. Consider what the response would have been had the target been a prominent anti-terrorism leader. Just as with the Texas cyanide bomb case, it seems fairly certain that this would have been lead news had the chief suspects been Muslims or left-wing "ecoterrorists."

There is an institutional element to this. The FBI has traditionally been slow to recognize certain crimes as terrorism. For instance, for years they declined to treat abortion-clinic bombings as acts of domestic terrorism; that was, however, before Eric Rudolph's rampage made irrevocably clear that this was indeed their real nature. And if you examine FBI statistics on domestic terrorism and compare them to records of real crimes, you'll discover that a substantial body of fairly clear domestic-terror cases that fully meet the FBI's own definition of terrorism have been omitted from the FBI's consideration.

Nonetheless, it is clear that this tendency has, since Sept. 11, become the pro forma policy of federal law enforcement. I've described previously how the Bush administration's emphasis on the "war on terror" bears all the earmarks of a political marketing campaign, precisely because it exclusively focuses on Arab nations as the source of terrorism, and when dealing with its domestic aspect, is only concerned about Muslim extremists operating clandestinely here. The existence of far-right, white-supremacist domestic terrorism as a dual threat undercuts such a strategy.

Neiwert goes on to point out that the same people who brought us the bombing in Oklahoma City are "still out there" - maybe not those personally responsible for planting the bomb, but those who laid the ideological groundwork for it. These right-wing extremists are looking to create as much chaos and social strife as possible so that people will "come to believe (as they do) that democracy is a failure, that it cannot keep them secure; and so, they believe, eventually the white populace will swarm to their authoritarian agenda when that becomes clear."

Why doesn't the Bush administration do something about this - like maybe letting people know that these extremists groups exist and actually acknowledging their actions as instances of domestic terrorism? Because this would "require getting the public to confront the reality that the "axis of evil" comprises not merely brown-skinned people with turbans and fanatical gleams but also that surly white guy next door with the pipe-bomb arsenal in his basement." It is ironic, or perhaps just pathetic, that this only serves to support the agenda of the right-wing extremists because white Westerners are portrayed as the Good Guys and brown Easterners are portrayed as the Bad Guys. This may not be the intention of the administration, but it is an effect.

Read More:

• War on Terrorism
• Religious Right
• Christian Extremism
• Christian Nationalism