Unspeak

by Steven Poole

  Capt Assaf L, who served as a pilot for 15 years until sacked for signing the letter, had similar doubts. ‘You don’t have to be a genius to know that the destruction from a one-tonne bomb is massive, so someone up there made a decision to drop it knowing it would destroy buildings,’ he said. ‘Someone took the decision to kill innocent people. This is us being terrorists.’15

  Notably, just as the perpetrators of Palestinian terrorism challenge the notion of Israeli ‘civilians’, one rarely hears of a Palestinian ‘civilian’ being killed by Israeli forces. Of course the Palestinians at the time of this writing did not actually have a civitas, a state, but the refusal to talk of Palestinian ‘civilians’ works to entrench an assumption that every Palestinian is a potential perpetrator of acts of terrorism. It is tempting to slide from the assumption that there is no such thing as a Palestinian ‘civilian’ to the assumption that there is no such thing as an ‘innocent’ Palestinian. Even the Israeli human-rights group B’tselem, in counting deaths on both sides during the second Intifada, distinguishes carefully between ‘Israeli civilians killed’ and ‘Israeli security forces killed’ by Palestinians on the one side, yet refers simply to ‘Palestinians killed’ on the other.16 Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, appears to hedge its bets carefully by speaking of ‘Palestinian civilians not involved in hostilities’.17

  Terrorism is a method or tactic of violence, and such acts are terrorism no matter who commits them. Individuals and groups commit terrorism; so do states. One reason why so many writers have resisted this obvious conclusion is quite understandable from a psychological point of view. It is that it seems to open the door to downgrading acts of terrorism that are not committed by states. Someone might say: yes, Al Qaeda murdered 3000 civilians on 11 September 2001; but the US military murdered many times more, for example, in South Vietnam. Unscrupulous thinkers may go on to use the comparison in order to trivialise non-state terrorism. And this cast of mind may then segue into a refusal to criticise the Al Qaeda action, or even an inclination to praise it. But of course you are not compelled into such sordid reasoning simply because you acknowledge that states can commit terrorism. Any person of minimal ethical standards simply condemns all murder, except perhaps on the rare occasions when it can be agreed that a ‘just war’ is being waged.

  There seems to be a natural instinct to imagine that where there is a wrong, there must be a right to balance it. Thus, if we condemn one act, we might feel inclined to praise another that constitutes a kind of counterweight in some global-historical moral scale. In reality there can often just be wrong as far as the eye can see.

  Evil folks

  In John Le Carré’s novel Absolute Friends a character remarks: ‘A terrorist is someone with a bomb but no airplane.’ In the light of 9/11, it might be more accurate to say that a terrorist is someone with a bomb but no airplane, or an airplane but no bomb: either one, but not both. (The notorious shoe-bomber, Richard Reid, did not ‘have’ his airplane in the sense of being able to direct it over a target.) If you have both a bomb and an airplane, you are a member of a state air force, and so of course you cannot be a ‘terrorist’.

  Just as the idea of ‘terrorism’ is politically contested, to name someone a ‘terrorist’ is also a political act, as is emphasised in this revealing exchange between a reporter and US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher:

  Question: Yes. As a matter of principle, does the U.S. Government consider terrorists those people who are resisting invasion and occupation forces of their own country? For example, Adolf Hitler was calling the brave Polish people who [were] resisting the Nazi forces terrorists during the invasion and occupation of Poland. Could you please clarify the U.S. position on this crucial matter? Otherwise, how do you distinguish the freedom fighter from a terrorist?

  Mr Boucher: We don’t.18

  ‘Terrorists’ was once a proud self-description by those who committed political violence: as Phil Rees remarks in his superb Dining with Terrorists, ‘The Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Tsar Alexander II and the French anarchists who manned the Paris Commune used the word with pride.’19 Nowadays, however, the word is a weapon rather than a badge. Its function is to essentialise and delegitimise the target. If his victims are ‘innocent’, the terrorist is ‘evil’ – so George W. Bush characterises Al Qaeda as ‘these vicious and evil men’, ‘these evil ones’,20 ‘evil people’, and even ‘evil folks’,21 a phrase that packs a weird combination of homeliness and biblical disapprobation. Now, there is little question that if the word ‘evil’ means anything it can justly be applied to acts of deliberate murder. Yet there is a difference between calling an act evil and a person evil, just as there is a difference between ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’. To call a person evil is to shut down argument, to deny for ever the possibility of negotiation, to go on the theological offensive. Indeed the imputation of supernatural evil has been part of the word ‘terrorist’ since it first appeared in the English language, in Edmund Burke’s famous denunciation of the French Revolution and ‘those Hell-hounds called Terrorists’.22

  In fact those people called terrorists, rather than just killing for the sheer evil fun of it, almost always have clear and specific political and strategic goals. That is why they commit acts of terrorism: in order to publicise these goals. In some places and at some times, a process begins whereby those goals are recognised as legitimate and desirable, while the tactics (indiscriminate killing) used to further them continue to be condemned, as has happened with the IRA in Northern Ireland and the PLO in Palestine. The unpalatable fact is that some terrorism works. In June 1994, the seizure of a Russian hospital in Budyonnovsk by Chechen forces led to negotiations that ended the first Chechnya war, prompting one commentator to declare the hostage-taking ‘the most successful act of terrorism in history’.23

  The form of terrorism known as suicide bombing is perhaps the most terrifying. Because the attacker intends to die, he cannot be deterred, and so the tactic is highly effective in instilling fear. The Fox News Channel chose to fight the propaganda power of the phenomenon by renaming it, because it was felt that the term ‘suicide’ gave too much prominence to the sacrifice of the attacker. According to Larry Johnson, former Fox News contributor and once a CIA officer: ‘The edict came down apparently to stop referring to suicide bombings in Israel as suicide bombings, to call them “homicide bombings”. I thought that was stupid, and I continued to call them suicide bombings, because every bombing that kills someone is a homicide bombing.’24 Fox was not dissuaded; days after the London bombings of 7 July 2005, its website carried the revelatory headline: ‘Evidence Points to Homicide Attacks’. The story referred farcically to the bombings having killed ‘at least 52 in what could be the first homicide attacks in Western Europe’.25

  Suicide bombing, further, is usually explained by secular westerners as having an irreducibly religious component, because, for example, its perpetrators often claim to be going to paradise, and are celebrated as ‘martyrs’. This enables us to think of suicide bombers as fanatics, as operating exclusively in an apocalyptic religious dimension and not a rational, political one. So George W. Bush described the Al Qaeda suicide attackers as part of ‘a cult of evil’.26 If, however, we cling to the view that suicide bombers, and indeed all perpetrators of terrorism, are not rational actors, little of a positive nature will result. Robert Pape made a study of all suicide attacks around the world between 1980 and 2003, and found that: ‘The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think […] What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.’27 The first suicide bombers of modern times, according to sociologist Michael Mann, were the Hezbollah members who blew up the peacekeeping headquarters in Beirut on 23 October 1983. Mann notes that: ‘Hezbollah was more
of a Lebanese nationalist than an Islamist movement. In fact, the clerics among its leaders tended to oppose the new tactic, saying Islam could not justify suicide.’ Suicide bombing was adopted in 1987 by ‘the militants of the secular Tamil Tiger “national liberation” movement in Sri Lanka’.28 Mann also points out that dead Jewish practitioners of terrorism in Mandate Palestine ‘are honored as Israeli martyrs’,29 but this does not change the fact that their aims – the departure of the British and the creation of a Jewish state – were specific and secular.

  Osama bin Laden, meanwhile, mixes his geopolitical ambitions of US withdrawal from all Middle Eastern territories and a united Arab caliphate under his reading of Islamic law – ambitions which, however unrealistic, are at least clearly defined – with a call for the extermination of ‘Jews and Crusaders’. In 1998, he declared: ‘The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.’30 Since it is hard to imagine any global arrangement in which no American, Jew, or other ally or ‘Crusader’ is able to threaten any Muslim (long-range bomber aircraft and intercontinental ballistic missiles mean that such a threat would remain possible even if all Americans retreated inside the borders of the continental US, and even if, as seems to be the desire, all Jews were evacuated from the state of Israel to the other side of the world), this incitement to indiscriminate murder seems designed to persist indefinitely.

  One might suppose that the fact that bin Laden’s tactics of terrorism are in service to an apocalyptic vision of jihad as interminable holy war would render the terrorism itself less effective as a political instrument, albeit highly effective as an instrument of fear. But his sort of rhetoric is not new. Interminable holy war has previously been declared by successful practitioners of terrorism – for example, the ‘Stern Gang’, aka Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel, ‘Fighters for the Freedom of Israel’), who fought what they considered an illegal British occupation, who freely called their own practice ‘terror’, and whose Principle I proclaimed: ‘An eternal war shall be waged against all those who satanically stand in the way of the realization [of our] aims.’31 Among the subsequent Prime Ministers of Israel were Stern Gang member Yitzhak Shamir and Irgun member Menachem Begin.32

  George W. Bush’s many references to those defined as Al Qaeda as fuelled by ‘hate’ of Americans (e.g., ‘Why do they hate us?’,33 ‘those who hate America’34) came under attack for their simplification, their ignorance of the historical roots of animosity. It is true that such considerations were largely ignored in the rhetoric following 11 September 2001, but the ascription of ‘hate’ is more reasonable than the imputation of evil. For bin Laden and his cohorts do regularly express murderous and indiscriminate hate: they want to kill all and any Americans and Jews, whenever and wherever they can. The message of an audiotape purportedly recorded in May 2005 by bin Laden’s alleged associate in Iraq, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is similarly open-ended: ‘We will sacrifice all that which is dear and precious until God grants victory to his religion and elevates his word or we get killed.’35 They won’t stop until a grandiose metaphysical ambition is realised, but it is difficult to know how we would test whether God really had granted victory to al-Zarqawi’s religion or elevated his word. Are we to wait until divine writing appears in the sky?

  Bin Laden’s loosely knit international gang, then, is engaged in something different from traditional liberationist terrorism: they are not fighting for specific rights of nationhood but for the global dominion of a particular religious worldview. Indeed, the hawkish ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, author of the anonymously published Imperial Hubris, calls their official denomination as terrorists ‘semantic suicide’: he terms them instead ‘insurgents’, since the training camps in Afghanistan gave instruction for all-round guerrilla warfare rather than just bomb-making, and since, on his view, ‘bin Laden and al Qaeda are leading a popular, worldwide, and increasingly powerful Islamic insurgency’36 (a word we shall return to shortly). Given their dream of endless mass murder, no one seriously recommends that we should negotiate with Al Qaeda rather than trying to kill or imprison its adherents. But for this very reason, their well-publicised existence lends an even stronger totalising charge to the word ‘terrorist’. If we have bin Laden’s associates in mind whenever we see the word, we are more likely to have an image of a terrorist as an evil maniac. Whatever political grievances or struggle for liberation the person or group involved is trying to draw attention to by their actions is shut out by the absolute condemnation of the word. The terrorist label becomes a means of blanking out nuance and pretending that the problem boils down to individual viciousness. Addressing it as such, of course, is not likely to make the problem go away.

  It also makes us more likely to think of a ‘terrorist’ as a Muslim. The American preacher Pat Robertson, expounding on his view that liberalism is more dangerous than the deliberate murder of civilians, declared: ‘Over the course of a hundred years, the gradual erosion of the consensus that’s held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings.’37 In fact, out of the nineteen suspected 9/11 hijackers in photographs released by the FBI, only four had beards, and not flowing bin Laden prophet-style beards but neatly trimmed little goatees or jawline-definers.38 Robertson thus implied this charming little syllogism: 1) All Muslims have beards; 2) All terrorists are Muslims; therefore 3) All terrorists have beards. Similar views were common:

  [T]here is a disgusting pattern: Not every Muslim is a fascist terrorist, but almost every fascist terrorist is a Muslim. Killers are not screaming ‘Hail Mary’ when they machine gun children in the back, slit the throat of airline stewardesses, or blow pregnant women up on buses across the globe.39

  Either the disgusted author somehow forgot the numerous acts of terrorism perpetrated in modern times by Catholic Irishmen, Christian Americans, and Hindu Indians, among others, or he thought that what he labelled ‘fascist terrorism’, by his definition exclusive to Muslims, was ipso facto worse than other kinds. The lines of prejudice were clear. In December 2002, Armenia was added to the US State Department’s list of countries whose citizens were thought to pose an elevated threat in America. The Armenian ambassador said: ‘We are a Christian country.’ Armenia was taken off the list.40

  Officially, news organisations such as Reuters, the BBC, the Guardian, and the Washington Post recognise all these difficulties and maintain policies that the organisation itself should never use the designation ‘terrorist’ in its own voice, but only when quoting others who use it. (These rules are not followed with absolute consistency, however: in February 2005, BBC Radio carried a story mentioning the decommissioning of the notorious Maze prison, ‘which housed hundreds of terrorists at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland’41: the BBC website news story referred only to ‘republican hunger-strikers’.) This has led to what some see as a farcical thesaurus-rush of terms in general use for those who commit acts of terrorism, such as ‘militants’, ‘gunmen’, ‘guerrillas’, ‘extremists’, and so on. Perhaps what remains of the linguistic spectrum when you abjure the use of ‘terrorists’ is a bit of an ungoverned mess, but refusing to use the word is still a good idea. After the July 2005 attacks in London, the BBC changed references to ‘terrorists’ on its news website to ‘bombers’, prompting some controversy. Columnist Nick Cohen was moved to complain: ‘“Bomber”, “attacker” and “gunman” allow no distinction between fighters who assault military targets and fighters who assault civilian targets.’42 It is simply false, however, that ‘bomber’ allows no such distinction: it makes no distinction in itself, but people are not prevented from making whatever distinctions they like thereafter. Rather than being ‘castrated language’, in Cohen�
�s strange image, ‘bombers’ is the most accurate, robust, and specific description of the perpetrators of the acts in question; ‘killers’ would be an appropriate word, too.

  A specific example shows how the word ‘terrorist’ can work as simplistic ideological sleight of hand. After the speedy declaration of victory in Iraq in May 2003, George W. Bush and Tony Blair repeatedly insisted that the continued attacks on US and UK forces were the work of ‘terrorists’. Partly this was a rhetorical strategy to entrench the convenient fiction of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; and partly it sought to argue that only ‘terrorists’ could be violently unhappy about the country’s ‘liberation’. The truth was that an increasing number of Iraqis were fighting an often brutal military occupation. In April 2004, fifty-two former members of Britain’s diplomatic service wrote an open letter to Tony Blair, helpfully explaining why his terminology was inaccurate: ‘All those with experience of the area predicted that the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition forces would meet serious and stubborn resistance, as has proved to be the case. To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful.’ Well, it was helpful in one sense: to bolster in retrospect the justification for war.

  But hang on, you might say, isn’t the ambassadors’ choice of ‘resistance’ to describe those fighting against the occupation also an ideologically loaded term? It might indeed be read this way. Though ‘to resist’ is in theory a primarily neutral term, the noun ‘resistance’ inescapably carries with it heroic overtones of, for example, French action against occupying Nazi forces during the Second World War. (This usage is well understood across the globe: the Arab news service Al Jazeera, for example, calls Palestinian bombers ‘resistance fighters’.) Robin Cook, the former Leader of the House of Commons who resigned in protest over the Iraq war, also used the term when he later wrote: ‘The nadir of the occupation came at Fallujah when over three weeks in spring US marines attempted to storm a city that was a centre of Sunni resistance.’43