It’s starting to become clear that, to the Bush administration — and their corporate and media cohorts — the definition of a “terrorist” is “someone we don’t like.”

All in the past week, we were treated to the following spectacles:

– An administration official — the education secretary, no less — declaring the National Education Association a “terrorist organization.”

– The chairman of American International Group referred to lawyers who are opposed to Republican plans for tort reform as “bar terrorists.”

– CNN’s Judy Woodruff, in an interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, chiding the Haitian leader that the armed thugs rampaging through the island nation were not “terrorists” but rather “political opponents.”

But in the meantime, a mail bomber in Arizona can set off an explosion in a government office — one aimed at promoting racial diversity — and hardly anyone hears a peep about it. Certainly, no one has begun referring to the attack as terrorism, even though that is quite clearly what it is.

It happened Thursday in Scottsdale:

Bomb in mail injures 3 at Scottsdale city office

Don Logan, director of Scottsdale’s Office of Diversity and Dialogue, suffered serious burns on his hands and arms in the 1 p.m. explosion at the Human Resources Building near Scottsdale City Hall. A mailroom employee delivered the letter-size package to Logan, to whom it was addressed, in his cubicle.

Logan’s secretary, Renita Linyard, and a co-worker, Jacque Bell, suffered minor injuries.

When the package exploded, it shot shrapnel into the walls, carpet and ceiling and burned a 3 1/2-inch-wide hole in Logan’s desk. About 25 people were evacuated from the building.

Of course, since this is only the local government office most likely to be targeted by white supremacists, and it was indeed headed by a black man, local police officials and the federal postal inspectors promptly declined to consider this an act of terrorism, emphasizing instead that they were looking into whether someone had personal reasons for sending the bomb:

City officials were unaware of any grievances, threats or orders of protection against Logan or others in the Office of Diversity and Dialogue. They say they have no reason to believe race or Logan’s position provided a motive for the bombing. Logan is Black.

Well, it’s obvious that investigators should be looking at personal motives for the attack. At the same time, the very fact that the office that was bombed operated a racially sensitive program and is a likely target for hate groups should have alerted investigators to the presumably equal likelihood this was a case of domestic terrorism. Evidently, it did not.

The same “see no evil” approach to the investigation seems to be the mode of operation for federal postal inspectors. In the next day’s story there was this explanation:

“We are looking at all motives as a possibility,” said Bob Maes, spokesman for the Postal Inspection Service. He said Logan’s professional and personal lives are being investigated, with a focus on someone who might hold a grudge against him.

Fortunately, not everyone is buying this:

City leaders throughout the Valley questioned racism’s role in the bombing.

Logan’s colleagues said his position made him a natural target.

Logan, who is Black, grew up in south Phoenix and became one of the Valley’s leading voices for diversity.

“His mere being and his work (were) a threat to someone, and that’s unfortunate and that’s sad,” said Rory Gilbert, who heads up Phoenix’s Human Relations Commission.

Logan, a 24-year Scottsdale employee, created Scottsdale’s Office of Diversity and Dialogue in 1998, after allegations of racism in the city’s Police Department. He’s responsible for community outreach, employee training and dealing with grievances filed by citizens or employees.

Gilbert believes the attack against Logan could be tied to a hate group.

“We know there has been a lot more activity from hate groups as of late,” Gilbert said. Leaflets that targeted Blacks were distributed in Glendale near 54th Avenue and Greenway Road on Wednesday. “We can’t allow this to be the normative and just shrug it off.”

Unfortunately, as we saw all too recently with the ricin attack on U.S. Senate offices, fairly clear-cut cases of domestic terrorism are being treated as ordinary crimes — or “isolated incidents.”

This is true not merely of law enforcement, but the media as well. Perhaps the Arizona mail bomber is, in Woodruff’s formula, just a “political opponent” of the diversity office.

One can only imagine, of course, what the official and media reaction would have been if this were, say, the local Arizona immigration offices of Homeland Security that had been bombed instead. Consider what the response would have been had the target been a prominent anti-terrorism leader. Just as with the Texas cyanide bomb case, it seems fairly certain that this would have been lead news had the chief suspects been Muslims or left-wing “ecoterrorists.”

Warbaby at World in Conflict put it this way, in the context of the ricin attack:

This is a big problem. Terrorism is political or social violence with effects that extend far beyond the immediate target. Crime is limited in its effects and directed towards limited personal gain. The two are fundamentally different and must be addressed by different methods and policies. The recent ricin incidents are terrorism. Period.

And until that sinks into the numb skulls at Homeland Security, the FBI, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives and the other denizens of government, law enforcement and the military, we’re not facing up to the problem.

There is an institutional element to this. The FBI has traditionally been slow to recognize certain crimes as terrorism. For instance, for years they declined to treat abortion-clinic bombings as acts of domestic terrorism; that was, however, before Eric Rudolph’s rampage made irrevocably clear that this was indeed their real nature. And if you examine FBI statistics on domestic te