Terror? Murder? As the Dead Mount, a Debate Persists

WASHINGTON — With the authorities still looking for explosives, the danger was not even over when an F.B.I. official posed the question already on many minds. “Is this a terrorist incident?” he asked at a news conference Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif. “We do not know.”

Moments later, the local police chief stepped to the microphone and said there was nothing at that point indicating terrorism “in the traditional sense.” But, he said, “Obviously, at a minimum, we have a domestic terrorist-type situation that occurred here.”

In an era of jarring violence at home and abroad, Americans find themselves struggling to understand not only the forces driving attacks but also the very nature of what they are seeing. Assailants mow down innocent men, women and children in Paris and also in Newtown, Charleston, Chattanooga, Colorado Springs and now San Bernardino, but when is it an act of terrorism?

Liberals and Muslim groups complain that any attack committed by Muslims seems to be automatically labeled a terrorist incident, while those committed by others are not. “Muslim Killers,” read the cover headline of Thursday’s New York Post. Conservatives complain that theObama administration is too reluctant for political reasons to confront the reality of radical Islam or even to use the word terrorism to describe episodes like the shootings by a Muslim Army officer at Fort Hood in 2009.

Terrorism has traditionally been distinguished from other mass killings by its political overtones. Federal law defines terrorism as dangerous acts intended to intimidate a civilian population, influence government policy or affect government conduct “by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”

Within hours of the rampage in California on Wednesday, Twitter lit up with the debate. “What happened in #SanBernardino is terrorism,” Linda Sarsour, a Muslim-American civil rights activist from New York, wrote before any suspects were identified. “I don’t care what the race or religion of the perpetrators are.”

But Tommy Vietor, a former national security spokesman for President Obama, expressed exasperation with the fixation on the term. “So frustrating how much we debate words to define the action, and how little we debate policy choices to prevent it,” he wrote.