The definition of terrorism

Are right-wingers who perpetrate acts of public violence to affect public policy, terrorists? Or is that term just for Osama bin Laden and... the Earth Liberation Front?

Back on June 4, this came up on "Talk of the Nation". The reason was that a few Earth Liberation Front'ers are facing extended sentences for burning down some buildings. Whether they get the heavier sentences depends on whether the judge chooses to define their acts as terroristic.

The "Talk of the Nation" discussion, focusing as it did on left-wing groups, put me in mind of an old pet peeve. When Eric Rudolph (Atlanta Olympics bombing, attacks on numerous women's reproductive health clinics) was brought to trial in 2005 after hiding in the woods like Rambo for a couple of years, none of the reporting at the time referred to him as a terrorist. When it comes to left-wing extremists, we aren't so peevish. And though the last thing I'm going to do is make excuses for ELF or their burning down of buildings, they've at least sought to avoid hurting people: Rudolph hasn't been quite as circumspect.

And what about the other right-wing lunatics? It's always driven me nuts that in the heat of our search for WMDs in Iraq, back in 2003, we found a large cache of chemical weapons - sodium-cyanide chemical bombs, to be exact - in a storage warehouse in Tyler, Texas. The only catch was that the bombs had been stockpiled not by Islamic extremists, but by a clutch of white supremacists. Ergo, zero news coverage. Was the threat less? Anybody out there remember Timothy McVeigh?

So I emailed a comment to "Talk of the Nation" on a lark; Neil Conan read it on the air. Here's an audio clip (~1:15 minutes).

...I see that Eric Rudolph's wikipedia entry does describe him as a "domestic terrorist", but to be honest, my on-air comment was the first time I have ever heard that word applied to him in the national media.