Déjà Vu in Pensacola, by William Kilpatrick

Do you get the feeling that you’ve seen this movie before?

On Friday, December 6, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Saudi military, killed three and wounded seven others at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. The New York Times immediately reported that his motive was unclear. If standard procedure is followed, it won’t be clear for a long time to come—at least not until the authorities can dream up a motive that has nothing to do with Islam, Allah, and virgins in paradise.

Perhaps the motive will turn out to be anger at America’s pervasive “Islamophobia” or disgust that American troops are stationed in Saudi Arabia. That, supposedly, was one of Osama bin Laden’s motives. It’s highly likely that the motive-that-must-not-be-named will not be named.

That this might be the case was suggested in a CNN story that appeared on the day of the massacre. One of the headings read: “Was the motive terrorism?” That’s a fairly stupid question. Terrorism is an action, not a motive. Terrorizing people for the sake of terrorizing people is the act of a madman. The people that we usually think of as terrorists engage in terrorism because they are motivated by something else—some cause or some belief system. That journalists are still thinking in terms of terror as a motive, and still avoiding the ideology behind the terror, suggests that we’re still a long way from confronting the underlying problem. ….