Recently, after a fight with his mother, apparently, Omeed Popal got into his parents' SUV, drove away from his mother and sister, and drove around San Francisco trying to kill people. He killed one and injured more than a dozen. Witnesses at the scene of the the arrest heard him call himself a terrorist.

Some voices on the right (e.g. Steve Malzberg, subbing for Bill Bennet) are saying Omeed should be considered a terrorist.

Unless there is evidence the facts I have read are wrong, I disagree entirely.

Terrorism is the tactic of trying to incite terror in the population to achieve a political goal. (Example: imposition of Sharia or the destruction of Israel are both political goals, though they of course have an underlying religious component and motivation.) But there's simply no evidence that Popal's actions were premeditated, and thus it's impossible to allege they were intended to bring about any particular result, much less a political one.

He'd been to Afghanistan? So what? If he truly went there to meet and marry his wife, as is being reported, then he might as well have been in London. If he was exposed to fanatical preaching, that might change the story somewhat -- but lacking evidence of that, this is simply a red herring.

Although evidence is sketchy, the same could be said of the guy who went at a shooting spree at the Jewish community center recently. If he really did have a history of mental problems, as is alleged, then this must be seen as a tragedy, but not terrorism.

Now, if it turns out either of these individuals were active in a local mosque which preached terrorism (I have no evidence of such), or that they had been motivated by the writings of someone who advocated terrorism (again, no evidence of such), or were raised by anti-semitic parents (the Seattle shooter's parents actually apologized to Jews, so that seems unlikely in that case) -- then we'd have evidence of 'terrorism'.

Does it matter that Popal said he was a terrorist? It should be taken into consideration, but if he truly has a documented history of mental illness, it means nothing more than the recent Jon Benet confession: People can say all sorts of things. We don't have to believe them.

Now, having said that, I will concede a few things:

(1) If these cases are not terrorism, then we must concede that when mentally ill Muslims "snap", and act in an unpremeditated way, it would seem, looking at recent incidents, that these individuals apparently have an unusual propensity towards violence against Jews.

Killings like this happen, what, two to four times a year? Some kid takes a gun to school, or some post office worker goes on a sudden killing spree. And Muslims are like, what, 1% of the population? Just as we'd noticed the strange propensity for postal workers to snap and kill (we even coined the term "going postal") so also we should notice this apparent propensity as well. If there are 3 times as many Jews in the population, and 60 times as many Christians, we should expect a proportionate number of rampage killings.

Let's review: we have a guy who went on a shooting spree at LAX, killing Jews working for El Al. We have the shootings at a Jewish community center. And this time, we have a guy driving around the area immediately surrounding a Jewish community center, deliberately running people over.

Like Muslims, Jews are also a small fraction of the population, so when you've got nut-jobs from 1% consistently choosing their targets among from another particular 3% of the population, that's a bit more than blind luck operating.

(2) Other than the local TV news, the media definitely appear to have been suppressing the murderer's self-designation as a terrorist. Which is odd, since they've been absolutely fixated on John Mark Karr's self-designation as a murderer. (He wasn't from Afghanistan, I guess.)