URBAN TERRORISM NO LESS A THREAT

The dictionary defines terrorism as "the use of violence and threats to
intimidate and/or coerce.'' What does a terrorist look like? The mind's eye
sees the gaunt face of Osama bin Laden, peering out from a cave carved into
an Afghan mountainside. But the definition fits, too, for the urban
terrorists who plague our cities--the gang members who use violence and
threats to intimidate law-abiding citizens from cooperating with police,
who use terror to coerce young people to join their deadly cabals. "I tell
you one thing, those drug dealers and gang-bangers are terrorists, too,''
says Mayor Daley. He bemoans that our nation seems willing to do whatever
it takes--muster enormous forces, send them to distant places, pay any
costs--to root out terrorists in Afghanistan while the war against crime in
the inner cities gets bogged down in legal technicalities and hypotheticals.

There's nothing nuanced or conjectural about Tamika McFadden-Harris. She's
dead. She walked out of her West Side church last Friday night into a
crossfire of gang bullets.

She fell on her 6-year-old daughter, Jada, in an effort to protect the girl
and then, as she lay bleeding to death, screamed at her daughter to run
back inside the church. Fellow churchgoers described how the area around
St. Joseph Missionary Baptist Church at Monroe and Francisco had seen an
escalation in gang violence. A local minister exhorted residents at
Sunday's rally to ''take back this neighborhood,'' but the truth is that
the war on gang crime cannot be fought by well-meaning civilians alone.

Hours after the rally, another innocent, Nakeda Stroud, was killed by the
same gang members who police suspect killed McFadden-Harris.

These senseless murders terrorize their neighborhoods as thoroughly as
anything al-Qaida has done. Across the city, children play in cramped
apartments, their parents too afraid to let them use war zone playgrounds
that sit, unused, tantalizingly in view.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 galvanized this nation under one cause:
to find and punish those responsible. We didn't just shed tears and shake
our heads.

We mustered up the will to wage war to the tune of $1 billion per month.

Authorities launched an unrelenting, multipronged attack that included the
questioning of thousands of people and the thorough scouring of bank records.

Don't our own people deserve an "Enduring Freedom'' campaign, too?