OKAY, I KNOW I’M LATE TO THIS — but what’s all this FBI ducking-and-covering on the motives of the LAX shooter? This excerpt from the New York Times story illustrates the absurdity nicely:

At present, Mr. Garcia said, officials are exploring three possible motives. The first is that it may have been a hate crime, although investigators said they had yet to find evidence that Mr. Hadayet held any animus toward Israelis.

But a former driver for Mr. Hadayet, Abdul Zahab, 36, said in an interview this afternoon that he often heard his boss express virulent anti-Israeli sentiments.

“He had hate for Israel, for sure,” said Mr. Zahab, who was born in Syria and worked a month for Mr. Hadayet about two years ago. “He told me that the Israelis tried to destroy the Egyptian nation and the Egyptian population by sending prostitutes with AIDS to Egypt. He said that the two biggest drug dealers in New York are Israeli.”

So the FBI “had yet to find any evidence” but the Times managed to do so by the unprecedented investigative technique of interviewing someone who knew him! Advantage: New York Times!

It’s true, of course, that just because an Egyptian guy who says he hates Israel and America shoots up an El Al terminal, that doesn’t prove that it’s a hate crime, or terrorism. Even though it comes after threats against U.S. interests by Arafat’s organization, and even though, frankly, only an idiot wouldn’t put hate crime or terrorism at the top of the list.

And I’m not sure that’s a valid distinction, anyway. Hadayet may or may not have links to organized groups. It’s possible that we’ll see the Louis Beam “leaderless resistance” approach applied to Arab terrorism. But it’ll still be terrorism; just terrorism of a different kind.

The unwillingness of government spokesmen to apply Occam’s Razor here, even with appropriate caveats, is embarrassing, and suggests that they still don’t get it.

UPDATE: Reader Fritz Anderson says I’m too hard on the FBI:

It’s a crime. Its nature obviously puts the FBI on inquiry. The inquiry is being made. But because the FBI is an agency of a government that is using “war on terrorism” as a euphemism for “war on jihadist islamism,” it can’t use the word “terrorism.” Or, at least, it can’t use it until it meets the requirements of what is now a term of art, and only then when security permits them to discuss it.

Well, that’s true in a way. But a similar dynamic of euphemisms and terms of art prevailed during the Vietnam war, and the costs of allowing that bureaucratic imperative to rule were very high indeed.