“To me, a terrorist is one who attempts to create malleable fear in a population through random acts of mayhem; someone who uses his own amoral unpredictability to magnify the power he is attempting to exert in an effort to create change.
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“Someone who bombs an abortion clinic or animal-research facility, say, in the middle of the night is not a terrorist, by this definition, because the purpose is not to prompt employees or clients to fear for their safety.
Here’s the first problem: “terrorists want to take innocent lives” is “put a different way” from “attempts to create malleable fear” because it is different.
So to not be a terrorist, Ayers would have to convince me that it’s somehow plausible that blowing up buildings, offices, and police cars is unlikely to make people afraid. Whether or not Ayers tried very hard not to kill people doesn’t mean that people weren’t afraid that they were going to be killed. And that might mean Ayers wasn’t a killer, and bully for him, but I don’t think it means he wasn’t a terrorist.
