The next time...

...you hear the Bush administration claiming there's been no terrorism in America since 9/11, think of this story:

A federal judge ordered an anti-abortion activist to remove Web site postings that authorities said exhorted readers to kill an abortion provider by shooting her in the head.

District Court Judge Thomas Golden granted an injunction Thursday seeking the removal of postings on Web pages maintained by John Dunkle. The injunction, sought by prosecutors in August, also bans him from publishing similar messages containing names, addresses or photographs of health clinic staff members.

Prosecutors said one posting targeted a former clinician for the Philadelphia Women's Center, and that she later stopped providing reproductive health services because she feared for her life.

That would be pretty much the textbook definition of terrorism.

One posting, which featured the provider's name, photo and address, stated that "while it does not sound good to say go shoot her between the eyes, it sounds even worse to say let her alone."

Harassing people with threats of violence, death, rape, etc. until they are terrified to continue doing what they're doing is terrorism. And there are conservative elements in this country who are engaging in this kind of terrorism constantly, the most organized and evident being those at the extremes of the anti-choice movement. Any issue associated with women, however—especially those relating to women's autonomy over their own bodies, particularly reproductive rights, sexual assault, and domestic violence—provokes similar reactions from a virulently misogynist contingent of activists (many of whom assert to be acting in service to Christianity). Last week, I got an email that ended with this ominous, all-caps message: "REMEMBER SOME PEOPLE ARE ALIVE SIMPLY BECAUSE IT IS ILLEGAL TO SHOOT THEM."

But this shit is never called terrorism. Terrorism has been redefined by the Bush administration (and their cult of crusading neocon minions) to mean "swarthy Muslim people blowing up things we actually do or pretend to care about," to the exclusion of "white Christians threatening and intimidating people we don't really like, anyway, doing things with which we don't agree."

I'd love some enterprising reporter to mention this story at the next White House briefing and ask what the administration's plan is to combat homegrown terror, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen.