Who is a “terrorist” and why?

The FBI says that if the LA Airport shooter acted alone, he may have committed a “hate crime,” but he is not a terrorist. The definition of terrorism, for American law enforcement purposes, requires organizational backing. Israel says if a person attacks civilians for political reasons, he is a terrorist – with or without organizational ties.

A distinction without a difference? Hardly. Although the U.S. and Israel cooperated intimately on the facts of the actual shooting, they are following different paths to understanding the event and the likelihood of other such events.

The FBI says that if the LA Airport shooter acted alone, he may have committed a “hate crime,” but he is not a terrorist. The definition of terrorism, for American law enforcement purposes, requires organizational backing. Israel says if a person attacks civilians for political reasons, he is a terrorist – with or without organizational ties.

A distinction without a difference? Hardly. Although the U.S. and Israel cooperated intimately on the facts of the actual shooting, they are following different paths to understanding the event and the likelihood of other such events.

Within 30 minutes of the shooting, the mayor of Los Angeles and the FBI publicly announced that it was an “isolated incident” and there was no further threat to the public. At the same time, the Foreign Minister of Israel called it terrorism. Twenty-four hours later, the FBI began looking more and more foolish as it continued to insist that Hashem Mohammad Hadayat was working alone. That’s how they explain a heavily armed Egyptian national who sent his wife and children to Egypt last week, and who was a very religious Moslem according to his family, and who blamed Israel for “ruining” Egypt according to neighbors, and who had worked inside LAX for five years and aroused the suspicion of El Al security during that time, and who – according to a sometimes reliable source – actually was a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and abetted the copilot of the 1999 Egypt Air flight that originated at LAX and left JFK for Cairo before plunging into the waters off Nantucket Island with a high-ranking group of Egyptian air force officers aboard.

You don’t think that last point is true? You may be right. In fact, the FBI may be right. Hadayat may just have been a nice guy gone nuts, but there was no way to know that in the first 30 minutes. Having gone out on a limb and SAID it was an isolated incident, however, the FBI now has every reason NOT to look for evidence of an organizational terrorist link or to consider additional information to be relevant.

This institutional bias against looking for organizational ties among evil people characterized the investigation of the first WTC bombing, Oklahoma City (which increasingly appears to have had foreign links), the bombings of American Embassies in Africa, Khobar Towers, Egypt Air 990 and others. If law enforcement authorities continue to work from the theory that all events are separate – beginning at the beginning each time – terrorists will have more time to plan and carry out their parts in this war.

Maybe American law enforcement needs to be reminded that it IS a war, albeit a nebulous one, in which they are engaged. There are no armies in uniform and no battles on battlefields. Their soldiers may be anyone and the battlefield anywhere. In such a war, information about who talks to whom, who works with whom, and in this case who prays with whom and then who preys on whom, will be one of the keys to success.

The operative American assumption must be that deadly acts against civilians in a political context are terrorist acts until proven otherwise.