“Eco-terrorist” SUVs and Saddam Hussein

by Will Potter on May 9, 2008

in Terrorism Scare Mongering

Eco-terrorist SUVAlong the lines of the recent culture jamming post, I found this at UncivilSociety.

Despite writing, reading and reporting on this stuff every day, I still can’t really wrap my mind around how the word “eco-terrorism” works grammatically. (You shouldn’t be shocked, though. This is coming from someone who thinks “green is the new red,” when clearly environmentalists ARE communists!)

To me, the term “eco-terrorist” should logically mean someone who terrorizes the environment. WAIT. Before I get all kinds of hate mail about how that is liberal propaganda, I stole it from Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist at The Washington Post, who says:

“Saddam was unquestionably the greatest eco-terrorist in history. During the Gulf War, he produced the worst deliberate oil spill ever. He followed that with the worst oil-well fires ever. Then came perhaps the most astonishing ecological crime in history: deliberately draining the marshes of Southern Iraq…”

But if “radical environmentalists” like Charles Krauthammer (cough) are wrong, and the term means “instilling fear in the name of the environment,” I can think of a few terms that better meet these linguistic standards. Like, I dunno, oil-terrorism, national-security-terrorism, and just plain-old all-American $$$-terrorism.

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