The term "terrorism" is notoriously flexible and the international community still fails to agree on one legally binding definition. How do we decide, then, what we call "terrorism" and what is merely an "incident"?  The Boston Marathon Bombings are the first case to be named an act of terror on American soil since 9/11. This has highlighted that the attributive term has almost no meaning left in US politics.

On the 15th of April, two bombs exploded in the crowd at the Boston Marathon. They killed 3 people and injured 170. In his first statement after the event, President Obama was cautious, urging that we "should not rush into judgement" before all facts about the nature of the event were known. Title 22 of the U.S Code defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence against non-combatant targets by sub national groups or clandestine agents." Under the terms of the constitution, for an incident to be described as an act of terror, it must occur under at least two conditions. Firstly, it must be an act of indiscriminate mass violence. Secondly, the culprits must be somehow politically motivated. By considering the statements made by the Obama administration in the following days, we can derive a pair of counterfactuals that show two very different conditions to those in the constitution must be in place in order to call an act "terrorism".

1. If the Boston Marathon violence had been a shooting, it would not have been classed as terrorism

One day after the bombings, President Obama said: "any time bombs are used to target innocent individuals, it is an act of terror." At this point, the culprit was still unknown, so it seemed like mass indiscriminate violence alone was enough to call an act "terrorism". What, then, distinguishes terrorism from other senseless acts of violence? 26 people died in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting and 12 people died in the Aurora movie theatre shooting. Here the mass murder of innocent people was not sufficient for either event to be called "terrorism". Instead they were called "mass shootings."

2. If the Boston Marathon bombers hadn’t been Muslim, they would not be called terrorists

After the 19 year old suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been captured by the police, Obama made a third statement: "we will investigate any associations that these terrorists may have had." However, there is no evidence that the perpetuators were linked to any designated terrorist organization; their motives are still unknown. Despite the terms set out in the US national security constitution, it appears that you do not have to be politically motivated in order to be called a terrorist. In the Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting, Wade Michael Page murdered 6 people. He had had ties to white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Instead of being called a terrorist, he was portrayed by the media and government as a lone and mentally disturbed individual.

The response to the Boston Bombings suggests that US government is brandishing the label "terrorism" as a rhetorical weapon. The Obama administration has replaced Bush’s "War on Terror" with their own "Overseas Contingency Operation". As the criteria of inclusion for this operation is so vague, fragments of political and legal speech have become tailored to characterise the opposition. The term "terrorist" is now being used exclusively to instil fear in the American population towards Islamic extremism.

Acts of domestic terrorism like the Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting are explained away as "tragic" and "senseless" one-off incidents. Every one of the three mass shootings that took place in the United States in the past two years killed more people than the Boston bombings. The difference is that they were commited by white males using legally purchased handguns. By refusing to call these incidents terrorism, instead labelling them as "senseless" acts, the government implies that we do not need to fear guns in the same way that we ought to fear bombs.

Attempts to find a universal definition for the word "democracy" were met with a strong resistance in the post-WWII world. "Democracy" was used as a term of praise, and so many countries opposed a universal definition because they did not want to risk having to stop calling themselves democratic. Similarly, it seems that the US prefers to avoid any universal definition for the term terrorism, and ignore the definition in its own constitution. A legally binding universal definition would force the country to condemn its own gun control laws as much as it condemns the concept of Islamic extremism.

Josephine Huetlin is a Features editor for Easter Term 2013.