I think that terrorist came into vogue because Islamic Fundamentalist Murderers, while accurate, was a little too close to offensive towards the majority of Moslems. IFMs?

My biggest problem with this answer is that it displays a complete lack of familiarity with the law. The legal definition of domestic terrorism is broader than one might naively expect, but it’s very clear and very well defined in the Patriot Act. It quite clearly includes any violence against life or property (or incitement to attack) that could/does intimidate the public or substantively interfere with the affairs of government. This includes assassination and calls for assassination, which I would hope Palin and McCain would’ve soberly discussed in light of things being hollered at their rallies. It undoubtedly includes (retroactively) the Weather Underground attacks, abortion clinic bombings, shooting at Federal agents enforcing the law in your separatist compound, etc.

Whether you agree with it or not, that’s the law. As a Governor in charge of her state’s Homeland Security, and especially as a Governor of a state with an active separatist party at the least talking about violence, it’s one of the few laws that she ought to be intimately familiar with. Regardless of whether she’s talking about firebombing leftist radicals or someone lighting up abortionists, a wishy washy “well I don’t know if you’d call ‘em terrorists, Brian!” answer should be incredibly unsettling for Alaskans who put her in charge of an increasingly important aspect of state governance.

Spencer, you’re wrong that “terrorist” wouldn’t have been applied to the Weather Underground. Take for example Thomas Powers’ Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, of 1971.

Fortunately, that’s neither here nor there with respect to your main point.

See also Richard Pearlstein’s The Mind of the Political Terrorist (1991), including the Weathermen (alongside Red Brigades, etc., but also Carlos).

This is curious to me. When has the U.S. ever been particularly sensitive to the sensitivities of Muslims? Have you noticed that almost every depiction of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood, for instance, is of menacing terrorists and bandits and so forth? Do you really believe that George W. Bush is paralyzed by political correctness?

So let’s see, we can all agree that it’s bad to blow people up but we’re having trouble deciding what to call the people who do it? How about murderers? Yup, that about covers it. Puts all the assholes into one broad category that no one can can take offense at and it avoids turning them into martyrs as well.

Think about it.

Bush, in private, I would think is a tad less correct than when in public.
In the movie thing, I gotta agree with you. However, I would bet that nearly all the demonizing movies depict at least one GOOD Arab, Muslim, or whatever. Them money grubbing you-knows what control the industry only go as far as the overseas market will allow.

This is curious to me. When has the U.S. ever been particularly sensitive to the sensitivities of Muslims? Have you noticed that almost every depiction of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood, for instance, is of menacing terrorists and bandits and so forth?

Have you noticed that the world’s most populous muslim nation is never associated with muslims, nor could be by most people if pressed ?

Have you noticed that Australians are still referred to as though nothing has occurred since Crocodile Dundee taped a tourism advert 25 years ago ?

That’s not a muslim thing, it’s an American thing. You have an insulated, naive, perspective of the world, so what else is the entertainment industry going to do other than cite well known stereotypes. Meanwhile, if Arabs and Muslims had made the news for other things, that might not be the case. But then again, what percentage of Americans watch world news programs and could have heard about that.

Kilo, thanks for the (timely and accurate) reminder of our cultural myopia, here in the “Land of the Free.” You’re right: not that many Americans know or care, that Indonesia is overwhelmingly Muslim, or that healthcare works swimmingly well, in most of the nations “we” have panned as being “socialist” (properly, Socialist Democratic).

This myopia is at the root of why we can’t tell a good idea when it bites us, or see that Obama is (literally) a gift from God, for a nation with it’s head up it’s arse. (Does saying that make me a terrorist?)

Sarah is part and parcel of this near-sightedness. She was raised not only in ignorance of the wider world, but to think that such ignorance is God’s gift to His people — so they can avoid being sucked into such spiritual traps as actually thinking for themselves. Ignorance of the complexities of reality is a precious commodity, to be defended at all costs.

After all, when things do get tricky, one can always fake it.

I think that the “war on terror” is obviously problematic for any number of reasons, the main one being that it’s difficult to have a full-fledged war on a tactic. Otherwise, I think that framing American security concerns in terms of “anti-western Salafist jihadists” is also very problematic. First of all, this implies that the US isn’t concerned with anti-western, or even anti-American, terrorism, so long as it’s not Muslim (Unibomber, Oklahoma City, the Weather Underground, abortion bombers, anthrax mailers, etc.). Second, it also seems to imply that the US has no problem with salafist jihadists who aren’t anti-Western, or at least whose primary targets aren’t Western (radical Uighur groups in China, Chechen fighters in Russia, Sunni Islamists attacking the Army in northern Lebanon, not to mention Shi’a and Sunni groups in Iraq attacking civilians of the opposing sect).

While we can certainly argue that radical Uighurs and Chechens aren’t, and shouldn’t be, an American concern, it’s difficult to argue the same for the other groups I’ve mentioned. If the US cares at all about what happens here in Lebanon, and by extension the Levant, it should be concerned with groups like Fatah al-Islam or Jund ash-Sham.

Furthermore, I’m really uncomfortable with people in the US throwing around words like salafist and jihadist, when so many American decision-makers (even those who work on national security) clearly have no idea what these terms mean.

As for pissing Muslims off, I think that regardless of Bush’s intentions, such an appellation would piss off not only Muslims but specifically, Sunni Muslims, precisely because it frames the debate in purely Sunni terms. What if Hezbollah were to attack the US again? Or what about a group like PFLP-GC? Neither of these groups could be described as “Salafist jihadist.”

Finally, concerning whether or not to call Ayers a terrorist. I’m simply not sure. It seems beyond dispute that in the past, he committed acts of terrorism. Now is there a statute of limitations for being labeled a terrorist? I’m not sure. For people, we tend not to think so: someone who killed another person 40 years ago is likely to still be called a murderer, even if he hasn’t committed murder since then. Does one cease to be a terrorist by ideological redemption or by ceasing the act even if he still believes in the ideology that justified it? I’m not sure.

This isn’t just important for individuals; it comes into play more broadly for organizations as well. If the IRA lays down its weapons, is it still right to call it a terrorist organization? What about Hezbollah, which hasn’t laid down its weapons, but which also hasn’t committed a terrorist act that I know of since 1994? What about Fusako Shigenobu, who is now just a little old lady in prison in Japan, but whose organization killed so many Puerto Rican pilgrims at Lod. I don’t have the answer to these questions, but what I do know is that neither the term “war on terror” nor “war on ant-Western Salafist jihadists” helps us out much.

The former, at least, has the advantage of being succinct.