Terrorism on Earth vs Terrorism in US Options

[MeanBastard]

My Sociology professor said something today that really made me think. As an aside to another point he was making, he said since 9/11 he's been waiting to see a stadium blown up on Sunday during a football game, or a suicide attack at a movie awards ceremony. Suddenly it dawned on me - we've been listening to and buying into these ideas about how terrorists hate our culture, and they're simply false. We've been eating up the idea that terrorism is somehow an American affliction that nobody else understands, and that notion is, again, simply false.

In Israel, one of your more likely causes of death is a man blowing himself up on a city bus you happen to be riding. That's a deliberate targetting of civilians. That could be argued as a hatred of culture. The buses have no real governmental importance, they're important to the average Joe.

In Spain, a subway was targetted. That subway has no real governmental importance, it was important to the average Jose who used it to commute every day. It was a deliberate and calculated targetting of civilians.

In Indonesia, a night club was bombed. Night clubs have no real governmental importance, they're a place for the average schmuck to unwind. Civilians were deliberately targetted during one of their weakest moments.

In Sudan, you can be killed just for what someone else thinks your religion might be. No questions asked, start digging your ditch. That represents nothing but pure hatred for a particular culture.

Militant Chechen separatists target Russian theaters, apartment buildings, and hospitals, all civilian targets of little governmental value. Perhaps most telling of all within the context of this contrast, Chechnya has ties to the same organizations that plotted against us.

Meanwhile, an American warship is targetted, and we call it terrorism. Governmentally important locations such as the WTC and the Pentagon are attacked, and we call it terrorism. A military contractor is killed, and we call it terrorism. While these acts are terrorism by the most literal possible interpretation of the dictionary, to call them such with no qualifiers is to downplay the true terrorism that takes place around the world on a daily basis, and to devalue the efforts taken against it.

The terrorists that target us target our military and governmentally important structures. These acts are political statements, statements made between two entities who lead groups of people. If they hated our culture, you would see many more attacks against America that are more like those that are predominant throughout the rest of the world. They would attack cultural landmarks and activities - the Statue of Liberty, football games, theaters, bus lines. They would attack things that only harm average citizens, with near complete disregard for government and military targets.

After all, those suicide bomber types of attack are the easiest and least costly on the terrorist's side of the table. Terrorists in America so far have gone out of their way to hatch intricate schemes of attacking the government that minimize civilian casualties as much as possible. If you don't believe that, I challenge you to devise a 9/11 that would kill fewer non-governmental civilians and have the same impact on our government. Don't bother if you're going to tell me bombs are the key, because as further evidence of their unwillingness to involve American citizens, these terrosts in their previous attacks on the WTC have already tried bombs.

While the war on terror is important to America, it's just as important to realize that it's important to the entire world as well, and that average Americans as a whole have so far come through it relatively unscathed in terms of direct physical violence being visited intentionally upon them. There exists, at this point, no reason to assume that the terrorists we're fighting want to destroy our culture or our individual lives. There's no reason to spend three years in fear of Lambert Field (of course I gotta throw in a little somethin' for my right wing fans ) being bombed. They have shown no urge to carry out those types of attacks against our country.

This is what distinguishes terrorist acts against America from terrorist acts against the rest of the world. This is why America's government is the most ready to lash out - it is directly under attack while its people are not - and why many of the other governments are seen as being softer on terrorism - those governments aren't under attack, while their people are. This shouldn't be taken as an indictment of other governments, because our own government was not overly concerned about the terrorist threat either until it manifested itself as violence against our government.