If shooting suspect were foreign, we'd call him a terrorist

Everyone in the media is rushing to come up with an explanation for the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others.

So here we go again. America is searching deep in its soul to find out what went wrong and where to lay the blame: Is it simply Jared Lee Loughner, who, according to his notes, hated Giffords? Or the gun he used, or the pot he smoked? How about Sarah Palin's online fatwa against Giffords and other Democrats? Or is it the right wing and the Tea Party's wacky rhetoric?

"Since getting out of high school, you could tell that Jared had become disillusioned with life and having to take on responsibility," said a neighbor. "You'd see him walking around and think, 'That's not someone I really want to know.' " His school kicked him out and informed his parents he would need a mental health clearance if he wanted to return.

The main question that everyone agrees on remains: Was the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others politically motivated? Politically motivated violence is the essence of terrorism, but in our open society and with our free press, nobody is willing to use the T word when it comes to domestic violence. Our history is full of such violence -- from the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to Timothy McVeigh's well-planned attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City. But the term "terrorism" is reserved to those others, the Muslims and Middle Eastern bad guys.

In our society, domestic violence is presented and received as an aberration, committed by disturbed individuals who should have had help, psychoanalysis and rehabilitation. Violence committed by Muslims, in contrast, is simply a terrorist act by single-minded people who hate our way of life and want to hurt us.

An American outcast who hated every American around him and goes on a killing spree is just a disturbed person. He is mental, deprived of love and care. Experts on TV go deep into his mind to find out the real motive. When it comes to violence committed by foreigners, nobody is willing to go as deep. Violence committed by Muslim Arabs is automatically seen as politically motivated and quickly labeled an act of terrorism, case closed.

Muslim terrorists seem capable of committing violence with clear intention, to terrorize the American people. Domestic terrorists seem capable only of misguided intention, committed by lost souls.

The McClatchy News Service quoted Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik as saying of Loughner, "When you try to rationalize irrational acts, you wind up with zero." Wow. I couldn't have said it better.

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Ahmed Tharwat, Minnetonka, is host of the Arab American TV show "Belahdan."

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