Which is not to say we do not still need our level-headed liberals to expose hysteria and warmongering. Indeed, the Muslims are not “coming,” in the sense of presenting a distinct threat of violence.33 While the possibility of another 9/11-style attack taking place in the US or UK cannot be ruled out, official and popular understandings of terrorism are more a matter of ideological projection and fantasy than of objective assessment. At first glance, the bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013—resulting in the deaths of three spectators and injuring dozens of others—and the stabbing a month later of British soldier Lee Rigby on the streets of Woolwich, South London, appear to suggest an ongoing domestic threat from jihadists. Both incidents seem to fit the current war on terror paradigm of young Muslim men becoming radicalized through their exposure to Islamist ideology. The events were quickly inserted into the preexisting script of the terror war on both sides of the Atlantic. Peter King, chair of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, for example, claimed the Boston attack showed “the war from terrorism is far from over.” Claiming “the new threat is definitely from within,” he argued that “political correctness” should not get in the way of even wider surveillance of Muslim communities.34 Texas congressman Louie Gohmert added that the government should deport “Chechens coming here … if there’s violence in their background.”35 The homemade pressure-cooker bombs used in Boston, assembled with explosive material from commercially available fireworks, were described by prosecutors and establishment commentators as “weapons of mass destruction”—a dramatic widening of the term’s use from its original reference to nuclear, chemical, and biological devices (as if the nondiscovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq could be redeemed by their imaginary discovery in Boston!).36 In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of “a conveyor belt to radicalization that has poisoned [young Muslims’] minds with sick and perverted ideas.”37 “We have to drain the swamp which they inhabit,” he added.38 A government task force on tackling “extremism and radicalization” was established, which would renew efforts to stem the circulation of radical ideologies in universities and prisons and on the Internet. New powers to stop broadcast interviews with extremists were floated.39 London mayor Boris Johnson wrote that thousands of young Muslims were suffering from the “infection” of “the Islamist virus.” Universities needed to be “much, much tougher in their monitoring of Islamic societies” in order to “to stamp out the virus.”40 The formula in London and Washington was the same: the cause of these recent acts of violence was taken to be the same dangerous ideology as that behind 9/11, which was continuing to capture the minds of young Muslims. By presenting Boston and Woolwich as traumatic repetitions of 9/11 and 7/7, fear and anxiety could once again be harnessed to perpetuate the war on terror with a renewed focus on domestic threats and used to legitimize further surveillance, criminalization, and demonization. There was nothing new in the metaphors of “swamps,” “conveyor belts,” and “viruses,” all of which had been repeatedly deployed since 9/11 to sustain a particular way of thinking about radicalization and camouflage the limits of official analysis.
What was most significant about the Boston and Woolwich attacks was left unmentioned. Unlike the image of terrorists in popular culture, the perpetrators were not members of any terrorist organization, had received no training, and barely had a proper plan for what they were doing. This amateurism was rarely commented on because it conflicted with an interpretative frame in which every act of terrorism was, at some level, a repeat of 9/11—with all of its associated emotional energies. Moreover, in both cases, the connections between acts of violence in the US and the UK and the normalized violence of the US and UK militaries went unexamined. In Boston, the pressure-cooker bombs represented an importing of the improvised explosive devices used in the Afghan war to a US civilian context. That the Boston attack might be linked to the wider violence of US foreign policy was what terms like “weapons of mass destruction” and “radicalization” sought to disavow. As he was hiding from police in a dry-docked boat in Watertown, Massachusetts, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the alleged perpetrators of the Boston bombings, made this connection explicit. On the inside wall of the boat, he wrote:
The US government is killing our innocent civilians … I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished … We Muslims are one body, you hurt one, you hurt us all … Now I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said [unintelligible] it is allowed … Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.41
It was this message, horribly flawed yet clearly stated, that official and media reflections on the causes of the bombings gave little attention to. In Janet Reitman’s investigation for Rolling Stone, for example—the most detailed media account of the two brothers—the relationship between acts of mass violence on the streets of Boston and that of US foreign policy was not explored at all. While the magazine attracted controversy for its “rock star” cover image of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the real problem with the article was its attempt to present the brothers’ alleged actions as solely the product of a psychological “disintegration” brought about by a series of individual misfortunes. Triggers for the brothers’ acts of violence, according to Reitman, include the separation of their parents; their failure to build a successful life in the US; the stress of struggling to pay college fees and rapidly rising rents; and cuts to the family’s welfare payments. The article suggested that rather than admit they were struggling emotionally, ideology gave them a defense mechanism and a way to project blame onto America. This deployment of a psychological radicalization model—supported, of course, with quotes from the terrorism-expert industry—enabled the writer to avoid a political analysis of such violence that placed it within the context of the global war on terror and its vast civilian death toll.42
Likewise, in Britain after the Woolwich murder, it remained taboo to suggest any connection between the killing of a British soldier on the streets of London and the killings by British soldiers in the villages of Helmand. The coverage of the event in the age of twenty-four-hour news channels and social media, with their supposed demand for diverse content, was actually strikingly one-dimensional: it was restricted to the official narrative of radicalization by a dangerous ideology. Yet again, the perpetrators offered a clear statement of what they thought they were doing, choosing to speak to the cell-phone video cameras of gathered bystanders rather than flee the scene. Bloodied knife in hand, and with the body of a murdered solider by his feet, one of the attackers announced:
The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers. And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone … So leave our lands and we can all live in peace. That’s all I have to say.
Interestingly, the only religious quotation in these words was from the Bible. In the ten minutes or so before the police intervened, an even more striking illustration of the politics of this violence emerged, as women who happened to be passing by approached the attackers to protect the body of the victim and challenge the attackers about their actions. One of the women, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, asked the knife-wielding perpetrator why he had done it and was told that the victim was a British soldier who had “killed Muslim people” in other countries. They drop their bombs on women and children and no one cares, he told her. Loyau-Kennett responded by telling him that if he wanted to join a war, he should have gone to an actual battlefield and joined an army rather than acting as if the streets of London were such a setting. This simple, spontaneous riposte, barely mentioned in the media, was perhaps the most important comment made during the entire episode and subsequent public discussions, because it pointed to the dangers of the idea of a global battlefield. To the perpetrators there is a war taking place between Western governments and an Islamic resistance, a war that is essentially global in its reach.
To them the streets of London are as much of a battlefield as the streets of Mogadishu or Baghdad, and if almost every other Muslim in London did not look at it that way, that was because they were intoxicated by the riches and comforts of a Western consumer society. But the attackers likely thought that a dramatic action like the one in Woolwich might shake the Muslims of London out of their slumber. “I want a war in London,” the attacker told Loyau-Kennett, by which he probably meant he wanted Londoners to stop acting as if they were not already at war, to choose sides, and take action.43 In the event, it was only the far Right which took the Woolwich murder as a rallying cry and began a rampage of violent assaults on Muslims and bombings of mosques around England.44 But, more significantly, in thinking of the war on terror as having a global reach, the Woolwich attackers were taking at its word the US government, which had itself defined the whole world as a battlefield in its interpretation of the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force—the basis for its use of drone strikes outside of recognizable areas of combat. If the US government believes itself to be involved in a war with no geographical limits, it is hardly surprising that its enemies might themselves adopt that view.
As scholars such as Eqbal Ahmad pointed out even before the war on terror, to designate an act of violence as terrorism is to arbitrarily isolate it from other acts of violence considered normal, rational, or necessary. The term “terrorism” is never used to refer to the military violence of Western states, or to the daily reality of gender-based violence, for example, both of which ought also to be labeled terrorism according to the term’s usual definition: violence against innocent civilians designed to advance a political cause (the maintenance of patriarchy is eminently political). As such, each use of the term “terrorism” is an inherently political act. The definition of terrorism is never applied consistently, because to do so would mean the condemnatory power of the term would have to be applied to our violence as much as theirs, thereby defeating the word’s usefulness.45 Ahmad’s point finds no better illustration than Congressman Peter King, who today rails against the radicalization of Muslim Americans but in the 1980s gave what would now be called material support to the Irish Republican Army by encouraging fund-raising among Irish Americans and telling a 1982 rally in Nassau County, New York: “We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.”46 If the British army’s presence in Northern Ireland in the 1980s was imperialism, then presumably its more recent presence in Afghanistan must also be so described.
If terrorism is defined as violence against innocent civilians designed to advance a political cause, the Woolwich attack in London is properly described as an act of terrorism. The victim was a combatant, but he was not present on a battlefield, so it is appropriate to describe him at that time as a civilian. However, by the same definition, all the racist murders that occur in Britain and the US are also acts of terrorism, because the perpetrators are trying to send a political message to minority communities (i.e., intimidate them into a subordinate status). Like the violent acts we normally think of as terrorism, racist violence not only takes the lives of its immediate victims, but also sends a larger message of fear to the wider population.47 Yet terrorism and racist violence are not considered to be equally significant threats by governments and the establishment media echo chamber. While the murder of Lee Rigby was a major national event, prompting a flurry of government actions, policy responses, and public discussion, racist murders are rarely reported beyond the local newspaper. This difference cannot be explained as a matter of the scale of harm each form of violence inflicts. In Europe, the violence carried out by far Right groups, which have racism as a central part of their ideology, is of a similar magnitude to that of jihadist violence: at least 249 people died in incidents of far Right violence between 1990 and 2012; 263 were killed by jihadists over the same period.48 In the US, between 1990 and 2010, there were 145 acts of political violence committed by the American far Right, resulting in 348 deaths.49 In comparison, 20 people were killed over the same period in acts of political violence carried out by Muslim-American citizens or long-term residents of the US.50 Both categories of violence represent threats to democratic values from fellow citizens. Whereas the former uses violence to foment a change in the ethnic makeup of Western countries or to defend racial supremacy, the latter uses violence to try to intimidate Western governments into changing their foreign policies. Ultimately, to be more concerned about one domestic threat of violence rather than the other implies governments and mainstream journalists consider foreign policies more sacrosanct than the security of minority citizens.
The political act of labeling certain forms of violence as terrorism is also usually a racialized act. This was revealed clearly in the hours after the attacks in Boston and Woolwich, before the identities of the perpetrators were known. Speculation in the US media as to whether the attacks were domestic or international terrorism used those terms as codes to talk about whether the perpetrators were white (and therefore assumed to be either crazed “lone wolves” or far Right “patriots”) or Muslim (and therefore to be understood as driven by the same alien ideology that produced 9/11). When CNN’s John King commented that the person arrested for the Boston attack had been identified as a “dark-skinned man,” it was not just an individual gaffe but the making explicit of the racial subtext to the entire discourse of counterterrorism.51 On MSNBC, Chris Matthews asked his terrorism expert guests whether government analysts would be able to tell from the surveillance images of the suspects if they were “from Yemen or other parts like that.”52 The suspect’s face was being asked to reveal a racial identity that would, in turn, tell us whether he was one of “them” or one of “us,” and therefore what kind of emotional response to the bombing would be appropriate. As it turned out, the suspects were in every sense Caucasian.
In reporting the Woolwich murder, the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, made a strikingly similar slip, describing one of the assailants as being of “Muslim appearance.”53 The black man he was referring to was wearing jeans, a hoodie, and a wooly hat; nevertheless his “Muslimness” had somehow become visible, thereby justifying the use of the term “terrorist”. A month earlier, another UK murder had taken place that was barely noticed, let alone named as a terrorist act. Mohammed Saleem, a seventy-five-year-old Muslim man from Birmingham, had been stabbed three times in the back as he left his local mosque. Only later in July, when the perpetrator was arrested and found to have also bombed two mosques in the weeks after the Woolwich attack, did pressure from community activists force the police to also describe his crimes as terrorism.54 The default assumption remains that the term “terrorist” is reserved for acts of political violence carried out by Muslims.
The events of 9/11, of course, stand out as the worst single day of nonstate terrorism in the modern era. But the stream of similarly devastating attacks that security officials predicted in the years after 2001 has not materialized while the basic mind-set of counterterrorism has not adjusted: its reflexes are much the same as they were on September 12, 2001. Certainly there have been a handful of plots, such as that of Najibullah Zazi in 2009, in which a terrorist act would likely have occurred in the US were it not for the government’s investigative efforts (although the argument that successful investigations depended on warrantless surveillance did not stand up to scrutiny).55 And a series of potentially devastating jihadist plots have been detected in Britain. Of course, governments claim the absence of a greater number of successful attacks is a result of their policy choices. But a closer look at the actual arrests made by governments suggests a somewhat different account. Those arrested for terrorist crimes bear scant resemblance to the popular image of Muslim fanatics out to destroy Western civilization through spectacular acts of violence. Of the 176 Muslims indicted or arrested for involvement in terrorism in the US between 2001 and 2010, a signi
ficant number were prosecuted not for violence but for “expressive” and charitable activities that the government considers “material support” for terrorism—but which would likely have been considered lawful before 9/11.56 Others are accused not of threatening violence in the US but of traveling to other parts of the world to join local insurgencies. Most of the remainder are individuals who have been convicted because agents provocateurs spent months pressuring them to agree to participate in imaginary plots they would never have been able to organize by themselves—in these cases, the only radicalization taking place was that carried out by the FBI. To a large degree the US government is fantasizing into existence the very threat of domestic jihadism it claims it is fighting.
In dedicating tens of billions of dollars a year to fighting a domestic threat of terrorist violence that is largely imagined, the US government has neglected the challenge of creating a genuinely peaceful society.57 An ideologically driven focus on Muslim Americans as the prime threat of violence goes hand in hand with a normalization of the fact that in the US fifteen thousand people are murdered each year.58 Indeed, the political scientist John Mueller has illustrated how our conception of the terrorist threat is shaped more by ideology than objectivity. He has calculated as follows: “In almost all years the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.”59 In the United Kingdom, despite the focus on al-Qaeda, the number of deaths caused by sectarianism in Northern Ireland over the last decade is similar to the number of lives lost in jihadist attacks. According to the University of Ulster, there were sixty-two deaths related to the conflict in Northern Ireland between 2002 and 2011. There were fifty-three deaths as a result of jihadist violence in the UK over the same period.60
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 3