#GermanWingsCrash: My name is Lubitz and I am not a terrorist

The cockpit door is supposed to keep the bad guys out of the cockpit, as Aviation Security International editor Philip Baum put it. In the Germanwings Flight 9525 case, it kept the good guys out as co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed the Airbus 320 in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. His co-pilot was locked out and he kept beating the door. The passengers knew they were going down. Imagining the moments of terror in the cabin can put off many a well-travelled flyer. The incident has terrorised air passengers all over the world. But unlike 9/11, this is not being called a "terrorist act". Lubitz was white, Christian, male and apparently depressed. The incident was called an accident, murder, manslaughter, mass murder, suicidal massacre but not a terrorist incident. And Lubitz is called everything from "crazy" to "psycho" but not a "terrorist".

People are outraged at the distinction mainstream media makes about kinds of violence. A popular Libyan blogger I follow posted a graphic that showed how media jumps to the word "terrorist" for any Muslim/ Arab/ brown person, but the white/Western male on a killing spree is labelled as a "loner"/"suicidal"/"lone gunman". The headlines often talk of the psychological ailments and family background of a killer to establish the reason behind an act of violence. In case of Muslims, just being a Muslim makes one a terrorist.

This short article concisely sums up Islamaphobic bias in terrorism labels. h/t @Kevin_Ashton http://t.co/k7tGOzbboU pic.twitter.com/FmtCqOBiS1

— Hend (@LibyaLiberty) March 27, 2015

What is a #TerroristBackground? What characteristics were absent that would remove him so quickly from the list? pic.twitter.com/S7FV2HBxgy

— Hend (@LibyaLiberty) March 26, 2015

Here, let me help you write your article. h/t @Amare_Mekonnen pic.twitter.com/nF4gVhcOTf

— Hend (@LibyaLiberty) March 26, 2015

Lubitz clearly wanted to kill all the 150 people on board. He was suicidal, but he didn't need to commit suicide by murdering 150 people. He had also told his ex-girlfriend that he will go down in a way that the world would remember him. There was intent, a purpose and an act of extreme violence. Like most suicide bombers have. Then why is he not being called a terrorist? Why is this deliberate crashing of plane killing 150 passengers not a terrorist incident?

Probably because it isn't. Terrorism is a use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political/ideological aims. The investigations are still underway, so we really can't give a final verdict but based on what has come out till now, Lubitz doesn't seem to have a political/ideological agenda that led to this cruelty. So the outrage over him not being a Muslim being the primary driver for the media to not call him a terrorist doesn't hold much water. So, the media doesn't have double-standards? Yes, it does and it is most conspicuous when it rushes to describe acts of "violence" as acts of "terror" in case the perpetrators are identified as Muslims. The latent and sometimes blatant anti-Muslim bigotry (that peaked in the past two decades) has distorted the narrative so much that this has become acceptable.

Anders Behring Breivik shot dead 69 people on an island off Oslo after setting off a bomb killing eight people in the Norwegian capital. He was not branded a terrorist. His anti-immigrant rant and avowed political ideology do make him a terrorist. He was involved in an act of indiscriminate violence driven by his distorted idea of politics. He was a terrorist. That he wasn't branded as one stinks of double-standards of the mainstream media. Many incidents of hate crimes, driven by ideology, also have been swept under the carpet, called "hate crime", in spite of qualifying as terrorist incidents, have led many Muslims, and other free-thinking people too, to believe that the terrorist tag is reserved only for Muslims killers.

That double-standard notwithstanding, we should also not attempt to find an equivalence when there isn't any. Like the outrage over Lubitz not called out. His act might be a terroristic one as Juan Cole put it, but he definitely wasn't a terrorist.