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When I was younger and in the Middle East I remember the airplane hijackings and it was always the same: 'take me to Cuba', or 'take me to Beirut'. The fact I lived in Beirut at the time didn't concern me much since I was very young and when you're young you really don't think of things the same way as the rest of the world. I would see the news and watch the airplane (always Pan Am or TWA) sitting on the tarmac of some airport and the commentary would be very subdued and there was a sense of tension in the air: would the terrorists let the hostages go? Would the pilot fly to Cuba or Damascus? What would happen next?
As I got older the airplane hijackings abated somewhat as airport security increased and it frankly became almost impossible to bring a gun on board. I was older but still young enough to realize there were bad people out there, misguided individuals who decided it was their right to impress upon everyone else their narrow view of the world through violence. The term 'terrorist' was used strictly for airplane hijackings or bombings in the Middle East. It was a given the hijackers were of Arab descent, and it was a given these hijackers would rather blow themselves up than negotiate.
Then I came to America.
The hijackings disappeared (it seemed) as American news tends to be a little short on world information, preferring instead to report on sexual preferences of certain minorities and dysfunctional movie stars. I grew up not really thinking of terrorism even though civil war raged in Lebanon and the Iran-Iraq war took thousands of lives. Still, I was in America as an American and was sheltered.
Then September 11th happened.
The hijackers were all Saudi, all Arab, and all Muslim. This was reported accurately and the hysteria which followed was understandable. Terrorism was back in the news, and it seemed something we as Americans had to deal with. And we did, in our way, try to deal with it.
And then, something happened. The term 'terrorist' was starting to disappear from our vocabulary, to be replaced by 'enemy combatant'. These enemy combatants were not terrorists, apparently, but were just misguided people who had lost their way. And they were not Arab any longer, nor were they Muslim. They were just . . . people.
And then a doctor was killed.
Suddenly, the term terrorist was given new life. This story broke the same week as the story of an Arab man who gunned down two soldiers in front of a recruiting station. The abortion doctor was killed by one man who had a wish to harm one doctor, and the recruiting station murders were performed by one man who had a wish to harm as many soldiers and people as possible. The fact he was Arab and a Muslim was curiously absent from the initial reporting, and the fact he had been trained in Yemen, the 'Terrorist Proving Ground', was also omitted. He was not called a terrorist at all, in fact, in the beginning.
And yet, the man who killed the abortion doctor was called a 'domestic terrorist' from day one. Killing one person does not make you a terrorist, I don't think. Killing a couple, while trying to kill several, does.
Is this media bias or is it something more, something deeper? When is a man killing one person considered more dangerous than a trained terrorist from Yemen killing soldiers in front of a recruiting station? Any killing is wrong, and the idiot who killed the abortion doctor should get everything he deserves, both from God and the law. Yet please, do not compare the two. To do so is to elevate the killing of a doctor and lower the (almost) mass killing of soldiers.
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