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I Give Up: There Is No Terrorism, There Are No
Terrorists
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When the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the world's largest
news operation, decided in January not to call the Charlie Hebdo
attackers terrorists, this made an impression on me. The head of
the BBC Arabic service, Tarik
Kafala, explained its reasoning:
Terrorism is such a loaded word. The UN has been struggling for
more than a decade to define the word and they can't. It is very
difficult to. We know what political violence is, we know what murder,
bombings and shootings are and we describe them. That's much more
revealing, we believe, than using a word like terrorist which
people will see as value-laden.
Not only can the United Nations not define this little word; one
study, Political
Terrorism, lists 109 definitions for it and debate over its
meaning drives specialists to distraction. The concept just involves too
many moving parts – personnel, weapons, tactics, networks, and goals. An
American security specialist, David Tucker, urges those who would define
it instead simply to "abandon hope" like those entering hell.
His Israeli counterpart, Boaz
Ganor, jokes that "The struggle to define terrorism is sometimes
as hard as the struggle against terrorism itself."
If the BBC, the UN, and specialists cannot agree on what the word
means, neither can politicians or the police. Does it make sense to
soldier on fighting a semantic battle that will never be won? Why argue
for a word that everyone agrees in confusing and some find loaded?
Therefore, I too have stopped using terrorism and terrorist
(counterterrorism, however, is a tougher word to drop). It's not
worth the fight. Better to use words like violent, murderous,
Islamist, and jihadi, words that do not generate a
definitional uproar. Better not to have to waste time arguing that the
U.S. or Israeli governments are not terrorist.
Worse, this argument over terrorism diverts attention from the
important fact, which is destruction and murder. Rather than have a
debate whether an act of violence meets some theoretical threshold, let's
focus on the real problems.
I have written & spoken some 200 times about
terrorism; I argued over decades for its coherent use; note my Washington
Post letter to editor on this topic in 1984; as recently as last
October, I co-authored an article
arguing that the legal and financial implications of the word terrorism
require that it have "a precise and accurate definition,
consistently applied." My new view is that legal and financial
documents should be re-written without the term terrorism.
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From The Washington
Post.
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It's been five months now since these words fell out of my vocabulary,
long enough to be able to report that my analyses hold up and my
political efforts undimmed. In fact, I am better off unburdened of it and
its vocabulary debates. You would be too. (June 2, 2015)
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text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
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