Let's define terrorism.......

But first.......read this article from the Daily Nebraskan. It's relatively short, and small wonder. With the blatant stupidity this article spews, she probably can't write more than 500 words at a time:

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/opinion/root-speculating-misguided-facts-about-fort-hood-tragedy-won-t-help-1.2060702

(And this first is just a little supposition and smart ass on my part--her name: Rhiannon Root. 'Rhiannon'--this explains alot about her parents, to my mind. Celtic goddess......ah, hippie sorts. Which would explain the political ideologies of their daughter--Dumbocrat. Unfortunately for her readers, it didn't skip a generation.)

In this article, Ms. Root would have us drink the 'This man was simply misunderstood' Kool-Aid. And like the Kool-Aid drank by Jim Jones' brainwashed devotees........"it's a little bitter-tastin'."

She tries to draw a parallel between the Oklahoma City bombing--which, make no mistake, WAS terrorism........and the Columbine shootings with Fort Hood, and on the Columbine example, methinks she was pulling examples out of her ass, because her brain--I hope--knows better.

Americans, who live in the shadow of 9/11, have suddenly--mistakenly--adopted the idea that all terrorism is religiously motivated, and the examples she gives are simply not the case. Terrorism is also politically motivated--Oklahoma City--and it was confessed as such by Timothy McVeigh himself.

Columbine? Come now. That was neither politically nor religiously motivated--Columbine was senseless, mindless violence. Terrorism? To the kids in the school that day--it probably seemed as such. But terrorism, to my mind, has to have a motive, and their motive seems to have been their 'poor me' attitude at being lumped into the so-called Trenchcoat Mafia........teenage anger and rejection run amok.

Her reasoning is laughable. 'Were the Irish Catholics blamed when McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building?' No.........and neither did McVeigh stand on the sidewalk saying, "Agnus Dei" or reciting the Litany as he watched the building come tumbling down. And, as far as I know, there are no archdiocese here in the U.S.--or abroad--that preach the destruction of the 'infidel'--and their definition of 'infidel' is just as all-encompassing as that of Islam. (Although they give us the less sinister label of 'Protestant.')

And, as far as I have read, and as much as I watched the news when it happened, I didn't hear any of the Columbine kids report that Dylan Klebold--Jewish--yell, "Mazel Tov!" before he started firing shots.

Terrorism is also politically motivated. The reason it is so hard to define, when those who adhere to Islam carry it out, is because they invoke the name of God before they do their evil deeds. I believe that many Muslims themselves have mistakenly adopted the idea that their faith is the reason they wage 'jihad' against us.

My reasoning for this......I'm not suggesting that it's NOT religiously motivated, by those who carry it out. But those who are BEHIND it--the ones like Bin Laden and al-Zawahari, who are too cowardly to strap on a bomb--it's not religiously motivated at all. Their faith is what they hide behind--it's what they rally 'their people' around......it's how they brainwash the poor, largely uneducated parents in Middle Eastern countries and territories (like in the occupied territories) to send their young boys--AND girls (hey, they're not good enough for education, property, or equal rights of any sort.......but they're good enough to carry out the work of Allah)--religion is how the ringleaders in groups like Hamas, Hizbollah, and al-Qaeda get parents to literally send their children to their deaths.

.......and these people are too ignorant (and in this case, I don't mean that word in a derogatory way; I mean that they are kept ignorant by those who would 'do what is best' for them) to realize that these evil doers think no more of the future of the Middle East than to kill its youth. They glorify the cause to the parents--their children will be martyrs, doing the true work of God.

You can see--a little--a parallel in this: in the poor parts of this country (and I bring this up because many of the terrorists--9/11 hijackers included, until they got their hands on Bin Laden's money) are from poor families.......the Taliban for instance: Afghanistan, second to Bangladesh, was THE poorest country in the world at the time the Taliban took power. In our own country, in the poorer parts of the country--Appalachia comes to mind--you find people who are just as fundamentally Christian as these radical Muslims. Fortunately for us, churches in those parts preach to prove their faith by drinking strychnine and handling snakes--they test their faith and do what they believe is God's work, too......but they will only kill themselves in the process.

And now--many educated Muslims, too, have drank the aforementioned Kool-Aid of the radical clerics and imams: this is for the glory of God. Major Hasan is an example of one of these educated Muslims.

But the motivation of the leaders of so-called radical Muslim terrorist organizations? Their motives are simple. Politics. Hizbollah and Hamas want the destruction of Israel--they want what they perceive as their 'homeland' back. And with the establishment of their state comes power......after all, they helped set in motion the events that will restore their homeland to them.

In the case of al-Qaeda, I haven't decided. I am beginning to be of the opinion that while Bin Laden recruits his thugs with religious epithets--his motivations may be NEITHER political nor religious. His may be--like Columbine--senseless violence. Bin Laden was all too happy to take our 'infidel' money and weapons when Afghanistan was fighting the Soviet Union; and, by his own admission, he did it when we were funding Iraq (his fellow Muslims) to kill Iranians--(other fellow Muslims--and the Iranians, under the Ayatollah, enforced the type of Islam Bin Laden likes to preach, whether he adheres to it or not. It seems he would have rushed to their aid.) And if you need a history reminder--the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) were occuring practically simultaneously. And while it could be argued that Bin Laden chose to fight the Russians over the Iranians and/or Iraqis because the Russians were the 'godless pigs' that they were, I think it's more than that: with the United States backing him--and we were--he knew that if the Russians were thrown out, after their government collapsed, he (Bin Laden) could gain more in Afghanistan.

So yes.......Fort Hood was terrorism. And it WAS religiously motivated terrorism. But religiously motivated terrorism is something that power-hungry monsters have created--by making their own people believe that murder is the true work of God (and in doing so, making the rest of us believe this is ALL their faith teaches)--they hide behind their faith, and they do it in the most cowardly way.