What makes a criminal act terrorism? The definition broadens
There are many people who carry out murders in the name of ISIS, though they have no organizational ties to the group. Does that make them terrorists?
The New York Times examines the question in a story noting that the man who mowed down revelers at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice was dubbed a terrorist, though he had no obvious ties to a terrorist group.
“The age of the Islamic State, in which the tools of terrorism appear increasingly crude and haphazard, has led to a reimagining of the common notion of who is and who is not a terrorist,” according to the Times. “The spectrum of terrorism is widening and now includes attacks loosely inspired by the Islamic State, those carried out by its affiliate groups and attacks directed by the group’s leadership.”
The news agency of ISIS called the Nice attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, “a soldier of the Islamic State” who answered a call to violence, the New York Times reported in an earlier story. But it had no details of any affiliation with the group. Similarly, the perpetrator of the Orlando nightclub attack, Omar Mateen, declared his allegiance to the Islamic State, but didn’t fit a classic definition of a terrorist, according to the Times.
The newspaper spoke with Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a professor at Dartmouth College. “A lot of this stuff is at the fringes of what we would historically think of as terrorism,” he said. “The Islamic State and jihadism has become a kind of refuge for some unstable people who are at the end of their rope and decide they can redeem their screwed-up lives” by dying for a cause.
