"Two mass shootings, two completely different standards of coverage"

"Planned Parenthood was ‘right wing terror,’ but with Islam suddenly ‘motives don’t matter’"

Last month, when a Colorado Christian entered a Planned Parenthood clinic and fatally shot three people, the mainstream media rushed to make the connection to “right-wing domestic terrorism,” even though police hadn’t made any connection and the evidence was thin.

When two California Muslims shot up a government office several days later, massacring 14, national journalists refused to call it Islamic terrorism even though evidence of the shooters’ motive was overwhelming. (read the whole thing)

"Germanwings captain tried to break into locked cockpit door 'with an axe'..."

"...as plane was descending"

The captain of the doomed Germanwings plane reportedly used an axe to break down the cockpit door in the final moments before his co-pilot “intentionally” descended the plane, killing everyone on board.

French investigators said the captain can be heard asking “several times” for access after identifying himself, but received no response. He then banged on the door before trying to forcefully gain entry, with one investigator telling The New York Times: “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

Internet rumor is that the co-pilot was a Muslim convert... (via Gateway Pundit)

Authorities are not yet calling it a terrorist attack.

What is terrorism?

Your definition. Please say, for I do not know. I never felt that feeling. I've been scared but not actually terrorized, so I don't know about that. And I'm not  sure what anyone else means when they say it. 

I'd say it'd have to be massive

I'd have to be ideologically motivated

I'd have to be utterly unpredictably random

I'd have to be universally contemptibly psychopathic

Id' have to require a lot of nefarious planning

Louis Jacobson writing for politifact.

Our government calls it different things

* Cabinet departments focus on civilians but State Department includes noncombatant targets, cafes and facilities of off-duty service personnel, military installations.

* FBI abortion clinics, medical research facilities, business, property damage motivated by ideology

* Homeland Security  critical infrastructure and mass destruction

* Defense threat more than actual acts of violence, cites religion

 That's just the government. 

Peter Spiro, Temple University law professor points out our immigration policy defines it so broadly it excludes someone who gives $5.00 to Hamas' humanitarian arm.  [come on, bad example there]

Steven Ratner U. Michigan law professor notes United Nations is stuck because some countries want exemptions for liberation movements.

Terrorism scholar Walter Laqueur, concludes no all-embracing definition will ever be found because there is not one terrorism, the terrorism that can be talked about is not the true terrorism, but there have been many terrorisms, by many names, greatly differing in time and space, in motivation, and in manifestations and aims. I'm sorry, he had me going there and I couldn't help making up 25% of that. You'll have to sort it yourself, but it's close. 

He continues, used to be terrorism had a code of honor but nowadays it's different, everybody blowing everything up willy-nilly, nobody can make sense of it.

So now even terrorists don't want to be associated with terrorism, they want to be called freedom fighters, insurgent, revolutionary, rebel, militant, anything but terrorist. 

Jacobson continues, governments like having loose definitions to broaden their options for responding and once something is labeled terrorism then hard-edge responses are justified. 

And governments will deny something is terrorism because they agree with the goal. 

Governments benefit from the belief that terrorism is caused by non-state actors.

Allied bombing of civilians to induce their governments to end the war is  terrorism. 

It's a good piece, but reaches no conclusion, alas, no definition for you, and probably supports the position of never reading an article with a ? in the title. 

This concludes the brief synopsis, a word meaning "general view" that came from a stem synoran "to see altogether", the syn part meaning  "together" 

This concludes the etymology of the word synopsis.

Etymology is the study of the origin of words

This concludes the definition of etymology.