[Infowarrior] - Words as Weapons: Dropping the ‘Terrorism’ Bomb

[Richard Forno]

April 2, 2010
Words as Weapons: Dropping the ‘Terrorism’ Bomb
By SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/weekinreview/04shane.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON — Words can be weapons, too. So after nearly every new  
report of political violence, whether merely plotted or actually  
carried out, there is a vocabulary debate: Should it be labeled  
“terrorism”?

When early reports of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s shooting spree at Fort  
Hood, Tex., in November mentioned his personal problems and failed to  
apply the T-word, activists on the right cried foul: He’s a radical  
Muslim terrorist, they said, and only political correctness run amok  
could argue otherwise.

When A. Joseph Stack III flew his Piper Dakota into an Internal  
Revenue Service office building in Austin, Tex., in February, killing  
himself and an I.R.S. manager, it was the left that blew the  
linguistic whistle: If such a public, politically motivated act of  
lethal violence is not terrorism, they asked, just what is?

Last week, the arrests of nine members of the Hutaree Christian sect  
in Michigan on charges that they plotted to kill police officers and  
then bomb their funerals stirred up the question again.

Were they terrorists? Were they Christians? Were they just weirdos?  
Had they been Muslims, some commentators complained, there would have  
been not a moment’s hesitation at applying both names: Islamic  
terrorism.

“None dare call it terrorism,” wrote David Dayen at the liberal  
Firedoglake blog, noting that most of the major media outlets had not  
used the word “terrorism” in reporting the Hutaree arrests for  
plotting exactly that. “These are Christians, so they cannot be  
terrorists. Or something,” he added, with sarcasm.

At Lucianne Goldberg’s conservative Web site, Lucianne.com, a  
contributor calling himself kanphil rejected the labels: “Not  
Christians. Not terrorists. Just dimwits that couldn’t organize a  
decent deer hunt.”

The right-left squabbles are an attempt to spin violence for political  
advantage. If Major Hasan was a Muslim terrorist, the right’s logic  
goes, then oversensitivity to the rights of Muslims is unjustified and  
the tough security measures of the Dick Cheney school are validated.  
If the Hutaree are government-fearing, right-wing Christians, the left  
suggests, then perhaps there is reason to be wary of the extremism of  
other anti-government, conservative Christians, whether of the Tea  
Party or plain Republican Party variety.

But more is at stake here than semantics or petty point-scoring in the  
blogosphere. Political violence has two elements: the act, and the  
meaning attached to it. Long after the smoke of an explosion has  
cleared, the battle over language goes on, as contending sides seek to  
aggrandize the act or dismiss it, portray it as noble or denounce it  
as  vile.

“The use of the term terrorism delegitimizes the opponent,” said  
Martha Crenshaw, a scholar at Stanford who wrote her first essay  
wrestling with the definition of terrorism in 1972. “It’s not just the  
tactics that are discredited, it’s the cause, as well.”

In fact, accused terrorists often throw the label back at their  
accusers. In a recording played in court last week, David B. Stone  
Sr., leader of the Hutaree group, described the government as a  
“terrorist organization.” And Doku Umarov, the Chechen guerrilla  
leader who claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings in the  
Moscow subway, took the same line in a videotaped message, suggesting  
that the real terrorist was his nemesis, Vladimir V. Putin, the  
Russian prime minister.

“Any politician or journalist or any person who will condemn me for  
those operations, or who will accuse me of terrorism, I am laughing at  
those people,” he said, “because I haven’t heard that Putin was  
accused of terrorism for the murder of civilians.”

The word originated in the context of large-scale violence by the  
state: the Jacobin Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, when  
16,000 to 40,000 people were killed in 13 months. The Latin root  
“terrere” means “to cause to tremble,” and one essential notion in  
most definitions of terrorism is that it seeks to frighten the enemy,  
as well as to inspire allies.

Over time, terrorism has come to be applied more commonly to the  
violent tactics of nonstate groups, often in a campaign of repeated  
attacks. The targets are often chosen for symbolic reasons (the World  
Trade Center, the Pentagon), and the victims usually include  
civilians. The acts of terror seek to influence an audience,  
ostensibly in service of a political goal.

The anarchist movement before and after the turn of the 20th century  
spoke of the “Propaganda of the Deed,” a phrase that captures both the  
violence and its purported political purpose. Their deeds included the  
assassination of numerous politicians and world leaders, including  
President William McKinley in 1901, and they were the rare militants  
who did not shun the terrorism label.

“They called themselves terrorists and they were proud of it,” said  
David C. Rapoport, a historian of terrorism and editor of the journal  
Terrorism and Political Violence.

With time, however, the term terrorism took on connotations of  
cowardice, unfairness and special brutality, whatever the larger cause  
it claims to serve. Today even the most brazen of terrorists generally  
shun the label. In a recent audio message, Osama bin Laden described  
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a  
“holy warrior and hero.”

Major Hasan, by the standard definition, would qualify as a terrorist.  
Whatever his emotional troubles, he appears to have viewed his  
killings as part of the larger global campaign of Muslims fighting  
what they view as American aggression.

Likewise, though Joe Stack certainly had his personal gripes against  
the I.R.S., the six-page manifesto he left behind suggested that he  
was dying for the cause of freedom in a blow against “Mr. Big Brother  
I.R.S. man.”

True, both men seem to have been eccentrics and sociopaths. But so are  
many who all agree are terrorists — remember Mohammed Atta, with his  
creepy list of instructions for how his body should be handled after  
death? By choosing, in their despair, not just solo suicide but an  
attack against others, and by attaching their violence to a political  
point of view, they earned the label.

 From the debate over word choice came the adage that “one man’s  
terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” a cliché already by the  
1980s.

“That’s a catchy phrase, but also misleading,” President Ronald Reagan  
said in a 1986 radio address. “Freedom fighters do not need to  
terrorize a population into submission. Freedom fighters target the  
military forces and the organized instruments of repression keeping  
dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to liberate  
their citizens from oppression and to establish a form of government  
that reflects the will of the people.”

But distinguishing these points is not always easy: Major Hasan  
targeted military forces; Mr. Stack surely considered the I.R.S. an  
“organized instrument of repression.”

Thinking of ends and not means, Mr. Reagan praised the Nicaraguan  
contra rebels, who had a bloody record fighting the Communist  
Sandinistas, as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” In the  
cold war contest with the Soviet Union, he armed and embraced the  
Afghan “freedom fighters” and their Arab allies, some of whom evolved  
into the terrorists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

That long-ago radio address sounds naïve in retrospect in another  
respect, too. “History is likely to record that 1986 was the year when  
the world, at long last, came to grips with the plague of terrorism,”  
President Reagan declared. President Obama is unlikely to venture a  
similar prediction anytime soon.