WHAT TERRORISM IS, AS WELL AS WHAT IT ISN'T

After listening to nearly hysterical appeals from President Clinton, FBI Director Louis Freeh and various others about the "Terrorist Crisis" that the country is supposedly enduring and all the urgent counter-terrorist legislation we must enact immediately, the Congress last week decided to take a month-long vacation. This decision, like the habit of Calvin Coolidge of taking a nap every afternoon while president, was wise.

When the congressmen return from their sojourn among the people, they need to do a little hard thinking before they take up the business of counter-terrorism. They need to think hard about what terrorism really is and what Mr. Clinton's new legislation might or might not be able to do about it.

What, exactly, is terrorism? The FBI uses the following definition, published in its most recent annual report, "Terrorism in the United States, 1994." "Domestic Terrorism," the definition says, is "the unlawful use of force or violence, committed by a group(s) or two or more individuals, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

This is a good definition that distinguishes terrorism from other kinds of crime and violence. But certain things follow from it.

For one, it follows that various violent acts committed in the United States in the last couple of years are not "terrorist." The derailment of an Arizona train last autumn by a supposed group calling itself "Sons of Gestapo," the recent bombing at the Atlanta Olympics and the destruction of TWA Flight 800 are not known to be the work of real groups or of anyone other than single individuals. In the case of the TWA plane, it's still unknown whether it was the victim of an attack at all.

For that matter, even the UNABOMBER bombings were not terrorism. Although the bomber was motivated by the political objectives of radical environmentalism, he worked alone and was not part of a group. The FBI doesn't count the four UNABOMBER bombings of 1993-95 as terrorist incidents.

But the key phrase in the FBI definition is "in furtherance of political or social objectives." It is political motivation that distinguishes terrorism from crimes committed for mercenary, psychopathic or other motives. One way the FBI decides whether political motives were involved in a crime is whether a group "claims credit" for the incident by a phone call or a communique.

In none of the cases of the last couple of years has anyone claimed credit, except for the unheard-of "Sons of Gestapo." The phone call about the Atlanta bomb, made 18 minutes before the explosion, was not a claim of credit but merely a warning call. Even if we assume the TWA plane was the victim of an attack, there is no reason to believe that it or the other attacks were the work of terrorism under the FBI's own definition -- that they were anything more than the work of lone nuts, disgruntled employees or criminals with their own mercenary motives.

Indeed, by the FBI definition, it's not even clear that the Oklahoma City bombing was an act of terrorism. If the motive of the bombing was revenge for Waco, then maybe it wasn't. Is revenge a "political or social objective"? Arguably it isn't.

Under the FBI's definition of terrorism, then, there is no "terrorist crisis," and the Bureau's own statistics on terrorism confirm this. Between 1990 and 1993, the FBI counted a whopping 19 acts of terrorism in the United States. In 1994, it reports, "there were no incidents of terrorism." The count for 1995 has not yet been completed, but except for Oklahoma City it's hard to think of any that attracted much attention.

One of the myths of the supposed "terrorist crisis" that we now face is that the nation is under siege by crazed "right-wingers" -- neo-Nazis, racist church-burners, militias, psychos who actually believe the federal government is too big and too powerful and other bogeymen concocted mainly in the fantasies of liberal fund-raisers. The FBI's statistics give the lie to this claim also.

Only four of the terrorist incidents of the last few years are ascribed to groups that can conceivably be called "right-wing" -- two attacks by skinheads and two by tax protestors. The other 15 are ascribed to groups recognizably of the left -- mainly Puerto Rican nationalists and assorted eco-freaks and animal rights nuts.

So there is no reason to believe that the federal government needs more wiretapping powers, more money from the taxpayers, more gun control or more laws to fight terrorists or a terrorist crisis that do not really exist. And that's what congressmen need to think about after they come back from their vacation and before they pay any more attention to Mr. Clinton's hysteria.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.