O'Reilly/GeraldoIn a story that you probably have not heard much about since it does not involve Charlie Sheen, on Wednesday, a 21-year-old named Arid Uka shot two American air  force men dead and wounded two others in Germany.
Uka, who is Muslim, yelled 'God is  great' while shooting.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, however, did not go so far as to call him a terrorist, saying:
"We are looking into the individual who shot our service members. We're  looking into his relationship with others. I don't know that we've made a  judgment yet on whether it was someone acting alone or someone acting in concert  with others. For example, was the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords a  terrorist attack? I mean, you have to look at the evidence, look at the  motivation and you make a judgment."
O'Reilly called this "gibberish" but Geraldo Rivera disagreed and took O'Reilly to task for only labeling Muslims as terrorists, and not others who commit similar acts.
"Let's take Jared Loughner. Let's take the example that P.J. Crowley  uses. Now, if Jared Loughner and Arid Uka were both acting alone and Jared Loughner either said nothing or said 'You S.O.B.' as he then mowed down 19 and  killing six, would he be any different?"
No, said O'Reilly. "If Jared Loughner had said, 'Allah Akbar' and then you traced him back to a Islamic  fanatical thought process, he'd be a Muslim terrorist."
Gerlado also brought up Sergeant John Russell, who killed five G.I.s at Camp Liberty in Baghdad.
"Was he a Texas terrorist? A Christian terrorist?"
According to O'Reilly, he is not a terrorist because he was not involved with the global Jihad.
"There isn't a jihad for lone nutty gunmen in Arizona."
The argument got pretty heated and ended with this:
Geraldo: "If every Muslim criminal is a terrorist, what was Timothy McVeigh?"
O'Reilly: "If a pickpocket in Medina, I'm not calling him a terrorist."
Geraldo: "Are you sure you wouldn't? I'm not so sure."
It is an interesting debate and Geraldo has a good point: what is the difference between killing people because you are insane and because you are part of the Jihad? Is one act worse than the other just because it was committed by a Muslim?
Food for thought.
Video below: