The Clipboard: Sniper wasn't shooting for Islam

From an article¹:

It also confirms the absurdity of efforts by some to link those tragic attacks to Islamic terrorism.

Yes, the main adult suspect in the killings is a man named John Muhammad. But robbery and mayhem, not politics, seem to have been his motivation. If that makes him an Islamic terrorist, then Timothy McVeigh was a Christian terrorist and David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, was a Jewish terrorist. (link)

An excellent editorial from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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Complete text of the article, Sniper wasn't shooting for Islam, by the Editors of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The discovery that the weapon used in the Washington-area sniper attacks was also used to kill an Atlanta man on Sept. 21 -- 11 days before the spree began up North -- has brought a frightening story much closer to home.

It also confirms the absurdity of efforts by some to link those tragic attacks to Islamic terrorism.

Yes, the main adult suspect in the killings is a man named John Muhammad. But robbery and mayhem, not politics, seem to have been his motivation. If that makes him an Islamic terrorist, then Timothy McVeigh was a Christian terrorist and David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, was a Jewish terrorist.

It is also true that Muhammad flirted for a while with the Nation of Islam, the cult headed by Louis Farrakhan. But traditional Islam and the Nation of Islam have very little in common; Islam and Judaism are, in fact, more closely related than Islam and the Nation of Islam.

And yet some, including New York Times columnist William Safire, have tried to depict Muhammad as part of the great Islamic dagger aimed at the heart and soul of America. The increasingly shrill Daniel Pipes, at one point a respected voice on Middle Eastern affairs, has accused the news media of having "shut their eyes" to Muhammad's jihadic spree. "When Muslims engage in terrorism against Americans," Pipes wrote, "the guiding presumption must be that they see themselves as warriors in a jihad against the 'Great Satan.' "

And in the words of conservative writer Mark Steyn, "When two Muslim males embark on a clinical, unprovoked campaign of infidel-killing, 'possible terrorism' also seems a reasonable conclusion. It doesn't matter whether they were acting on orders or simply improvising."

Such rhetoric is nonsense. It smacks of fear-mongering, of an effort to frighten an already anxious populace into accepting anti-Islamic policies that it would otherwise never tolerate.

It is terrorism by another means.

reference=http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/opinion/1102/08snipe.html