Brian Williams: George Washington == Terrorist

Brian Williams:

It is a story that will be at or near the top of our broadcast and certainly made for a robust debate in our afternoon editorial meeting, when several of us raised the point (I'll leave it to others to decide germaneness) that several U.S. presidents were at minimum revolutionaries, and probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England.

Leaving aside the obvious point that various U.S. presidents were revolutionaries (e.g., Washington, Jackson, et al) there is no reason to believe that they were consider terrorists.

Also note that while Williams is vague on exactly which presidents he might be referring to it really makes no difference because none of them committed acts that characterize terrorism: attacking civilians. George Washington waged war against England’s soldiers, not England’s civilians.

Now I suppose that some troll will combine my last statement with the fact that the al Qaeda death-squads in Iraq are attacking American soldiers and then claim—by my own logic—that the death squad members cannot be terrorists either. My answer is “Oh yes they are!”

The al Qaeda death-squads in Iraq are terrorists because they target Iraqi civilians and government officials. This makes them terrorists. True, they also use guerrilla tactics against U.S. Soldiers but this just makes them terrorists who also use guerrilla tactics.

Anyway, back to the main point. Tthis statement, of course, exploded in Brian Williams’ hands like a nuclear hand grenade. The right lobe of the blogosphere’s brain had a field day. My favorite is IMAO. Jeff Goldstein’s "9 OTHER analogies NBC'S Brian Williams would like us to consider in the name of showy, PC intellectualism" is also a must read.

Anyway, eventually Williams felt the need of a a little damage control.

While I insist that a re-reading of my question will prove that in no way was I calling the framers "terrorists" (for starters, the word did not exist 229 years ago), I regret that anyone thought that after a life spent reading and loving American history, I had suddenly changed my mind about the founders of our nation.

Here Williams makes a hypertechnical point that he himself never explicitly said the framers were terrorists. After all, in his original statement, he attribute the “point” that certain unnamed U.S. presidents were “considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England” to certain unnamed colleagues who attended an “afternoon editorial meeting”.

I have two reactions:

First of all, “That’s nice”: a certain percentage of the elites in the MSM have the idea that George Washington was considered a terrorist in his time. While I dispute that he was, Brian Williams just proved that George Washington is considered a terrorist in our time. By the MSM, that is. Thanks for revealing this, Brian!

Secondly: Assuming that Williams totally rejected this premise then why did he write this crap in your blog in the first place? It must not have seemed so beyond the pale at the time. Maybe he just forgot that his moral equivalency, which holds that al Qaeda death squads equal American revolutionaries, isn’t shared by the non-multiculturalists. (Oops!)

Furthermore, now Brian Williams points out it is actually impossible for, say George Washington, to be consider a terrorist because the word terrorism didn’t exist 229 years ago (i.e., 1776). Ok, true enough; the word terrorism was coined in 1795 during the bloody French Revolution, so it couldn’t be used at the time of our revolution. This just makes it even more of a mystery why Williams was so uninhibited about equating George Washington with a terrorist.