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All of these mysteries received substantial clarity from an NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem yesterday. Citing two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that report makes two amazing claims: (1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and (2) the Terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” These senior officials also admitted that “the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign” but claims it “has no direct involvement.”

WTF.

Lindsey Graham: “Homegrown terrorism is a real threat. There are a lot of people being radicalized on the Internet”

Graham wraps all his paranoid anxieties, whether genuine or for the benefit of his owners, into such a tidy package.

Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.

Just consider what the constant hyping of this “miniscule threat” has enabled. The once-controversial Patriot Act was extended for another four years with no reforms whatsoever based on these fears…

It is really way too depressing to consider all that Bush and Obama’s easy manipulation of fear and ignorance hath wrought these past ten years. The less we are evidently at risk, the more government stokes our collective anxiety disorder with its Department of Homeland Security televisions in Penn Station, its stationing of armed soldiers at the PA bus terminal, and perhaps most weirdly with its affection for police dogs everywhere.

With so few actual bombs for those cuddly beasts to sniff (did any dog ever find a damn bomb—has the “success case” for the “K-9” obsession occurred even once in history?) they might end up on domestic Abu Ghraib duty before we know it.

I could literally spend the rest of the day posting identical examples. That the targeted assassination plot aimed exclusively at the Saudi Ambassador was “Terrorism” was the automatic, unexamined, consensus claim from major media outlets, foreign policy experts, and the U.S. Government. Indeed, the accused defendants were formally charged with “international acts of terrorism” notwithstanding that it was to be a targeted assassination of a Saudi official. If anyone disputed this characterization, it escaped my notice, and I pay close attention to debates over the Terrorism label. Very few people, if anyone, objected at all when this allegedly Iranian plot was repeatedly denounced as Terrorism.

But now that it’s widely believed that some combination of Israel and the U.S. are behind the ongoing plot to serially extinguish Iranian scientists — see here, here and here for just some of the evidence suggesting that — it’s suddenly improper, even outrageous, to suggest that this is Terrorism. That’s because the U.S. and Israel are incapable of committing Terrorism, by definition. Terrorism is only something done to those countries and by Muslims, not the other way around (the list of examples proving this to be true is extensive indeed).

It would be hard to invent a better example of our culture’s hypocritical and manipulative use of the word “terrorism” than these murders of foreign scientists have sadly provided.

Al Qaeda is sewing bombs into people. Actually, not really. This is an “aspirational” terrorist threat, which basically means that someone mentioned it while drunk in a bar somewhere. Of course, that won’t stop the DHS from trying to terrorize people with the idea and the security-industrial complex from selling us an expensive “solution” to reduce our fears.