Photo: Bill Eli

When Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow a plane out of the sky shortly outside Denver, Colorado on Christmas Day, there was media coverage everywhere, and on every format.  Newspapers, TV, Internet news sites, blogs.  You name the place, people were talking about it.  In fact, they’re still talking about it.

When Joe Stack flew a plane into an Austin, Texas IRS building last Thursday, the silence was almost deafening.  Sure, there was some coverage from all the mediums when it initially happened, but it seems like once it was established that an American had committed a terrorist act, people forgot about it and went about their lives.

Lets not mince words here; it was a terrorist attack, whatever Robert Gibbs wants to say.  Anyone who’s read Stack’s letter knows that his goal was to make a political statement (though for which side remains ambiguous).  And guess what, unlike Abdulmutallab, he succeeded!  Stack actually managed to kill and injure people.  Yet, it seems that his non-affiliation with Al Qaeda, or other extremist elements in the Muslim world, makes his attack ineligible for much discussion.  Instead, people mostly went back to watching coverage of the Olympics, or of this weekend’s CPAC events.

My argument is that this attack was just as bad an any by a Muslim extremist, so why is there a double standard on the coverage, and why is there a relative amount of indifference to this attack as compared to one by a jihadist?

I would also note the difference in coverage, discussion, and analysis between Stack’s attack and that of another born and bred American, Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army major who killed 13 people last November.  Nobody disputes that his attack was terrorism, or they don’t anymore, and his actions received weeks of media coverage.

So why the difference on Stack?  Is it because some people may have thought this was justified?  In case you think I’m crazy, there’s at least one other person who has brought up this line of reasoning: Wesley Snipes.  Speaking to the CS Monitor, Snipes says:

“I think [tax revolt] was an issue even for the early colonists and the British, so what’s new?”

I know that conservatives typically make it an exercise to not listen to Hollywood celebrities (except when they do; looking at you, Fred Thompson), but he is right.  Taxes, imposed without representation, was a reason (among others) for the Revolutionary War.  And the debate continues today over how much to tax, or whether it’s morally correct to have some taxes (like the income tax).

Before I get slammed for accusing fellow Americans of supporting Stack’s actions, I would say that they do not.

Rather, I think the reason we see the difference in the amount and tone of discussion of the two attacks is because people see them differently.  To be frank, an attack from a Muslim, even an American citizen like Hasan, is easy to cover and criticize.  It’s not racism, per say, but the Muslim attacker is the foreigner.  They are from “over there,” in some other part of the world.  Even Hasan developed his anti-American sentiments by learning from cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is not an American (he was born here, but spent most of his formative years in Yemen).  The fact that Hasan decided to switch his allegiance to his religion rather than his country makes it even easier to frame him as the enemy.

Stack, on the other hand, was not really anti-American.  Anti-tax, or anti-too much taxation, yes, but he kept his diatribes for the American government and big business.  Stack stated that he once believed in the American dream, but over time found it difficult to realize, due to tax law.  Most conservatives could respond in agreement to that statement.  After all, it’s the very basis of the tea party movement.  At the same time, Stack feared the ability of big business to monopolize out small business owners like himself, and spoke out against what he perceived as their greediness.  Liberals would respond well those concerns, though even some conservatives have a streak of anti-big business populism these days.

So the difference between an attack on the U.S. fueled by anti-American, radical Islamist sentiment and that of anti-tax, but otherwise reasonable American, is that most Americans can actually understand where Stack was coming from.  They may not agree with how he acted on his criticism, but because they can understand his struggle, that makes it much more difficult to demonize him in comparison to the Muslim attacker.

That said, I think people need to get a reality check, and start treating this as seriously as any other terrorist attack.  Stack was able to take a small plane and fly it into a building.  We all spent weeks brainstorming how to make security better into the United States when the terrorist comes aboard a jetliner, but what are we going do about smaller craft?  Is there anything we can do?  Maybe not, but it is something to think about before one of those terrorists we can easily demonize and cover in the media gets an idea.