Classifying Antiabortion-Rights Crimes As 'Terrorism' Unnecessary, USA Today Opinion Piece States

Main Category: Abortion
Also Included In: Bio-terrorism / Terrorism
Article Date: 18 Jun 2009 - 7:00 PDT

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Scott Roeder, who is charged with the murder of abortion provider George Tiller, and James von Brunn, who is charged with last week's shooting death of a Holocaust Memorial Museum guard, "appear to be murderers, not terrorists," Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, writes in a USA Today opinion piece. Although "liberals denounced" the tendency of conservatives to call "every possible crime an act of terrorism" while former President George W. Bush was in office, now that there are antiabortion-rights and anti-Semetic suspects, "there is an insistence that these crimes must be treated as terrorism -- as if to call them 'murder' or 'hate crimes' would diminish their significance," Turley states.

Many people who "kill strangers out of hate for their race or religion or some other association" are "loners or rogue operators who seek to satisfy a blood lust against different groups," Turley contends, noting that classifying a crime as an act of terrorism allows for a different types of prosecution, investigation and punishment. According to Turley, the "term 'terrorism' once had a clear meaning before it was used as a point of emphasis to evaluate or distinguish certain crimes." The Bush administration's broadening of the definition to include "any prosecution that disrupts a 'potential' terrorism threat" served to further divert the term from its historical definition, he adds. Now, "many want to see terrorism investigations targeting antiabortion activists and other groups that use violent speech," Turley writes.

"We do not advance our efforts by classifying every hate crime as terrorism," Turley continues, adding that it would be "the terrorists who will benefit from our lack of focus" in the definition. According to Turley, the "fact is that even an authoritarian nation can do little to stop a determined rogue operator from walking into a church and killing someone like Dr. Tiller." Referring to "someone such as Roeder as a murderer does not diminish the crime or the victim" because "we do not have to call murder 'terrorism' to take the crime or its causes seriously," Turley writes (Turley, USA Today, 6/17).

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