<< Last weekend, a 35-year-old woman was standing outside a Valentino store in Manhattan when, as she later told police, she felt heat on her left side. Her blouse was on fire, and a man stood nearby with a lighter in his hand. The women, whose name has not been released by the New York Police Department, escaped with a hole in her blouse and no injuries. The NYPD is investigating the incident as a possible hate crime—the woman is Muslim, and she was wear a hijab. >> (source: The Washington Post)
So, why is that not terrorism? Is terrorism limited to only when a bomb is set off in New York by a person of Middle Eastern descent or Muslim faith and aimed at Westerners, or when that person walks into a crowded space and commences to unload their automatic weapon against those more familiar faces? Is that how limited we’ve become in our perspective of what constitutes an act of terror?