If anything was proven by the recent Airbus tragedy it is that no amount of bluster or threatening

[jberryhill]

6. So what?

The OP is written as a response to (a) people in the media who are proclaiming it to be so, and (b) their underlying thesis that terrorism results from not torturing enough people.

I did not read the OP as some kind of conclusion that it was an act of terrorism because, of course, that has not been demonstrated to be the case. A depressed German pilot managed to kill more people in taking down a plane than this event, which also says things about people's sense of scale. But I digress.

What has happened here is that a presidential candidate is using this as an opportunity to promote his counterproductive nonsense. The OP is primarily addressed to that counterproductive nonsense. Whether the loss of the airliner is or is not the result of a terrorist act is utterly and thoroughly irrelevant to the point made in the OP about the way that we react to these things counterproductively.