Terrorism: The Most Meaningless and Manipulated Word

Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a
building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the
political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage
over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of
the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their
government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to
why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those
injustices:

I remember reading
about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how
there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when
they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn't it ironic how
far we've come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to
fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class
(who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their
asses and it's "business-as-usual" . . . . Sadly, though I spent my
entire life trying to believe it wasn't so, but violence not only is
the answer, it is the only answer.

Despite all that, The New York Times' Brian Stelter documents
the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials
to label the incident an act of "terrorism," even though -- as Dave Neiwert ably documents
-- it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every
official definition of that term. The issue isn't whether Stack's
grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act
unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC's
Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act
of Terrorism: there are "a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he's an American citizen." Fox News' Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: "I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?," to which Herridge replied: "they mean terrorism in that capital T way."

All
of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the
single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American
political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the
act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor,
especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to
mean: "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards
the United States, Israel and their allies." That's why all of this
confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who
perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a
Terrorist: he's not a Muslim and isn't acting on behalf of standard
Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the
"definition." One might concede that perhaps there's some technical
sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized:
it's not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . .
. terrorism in that capital T way." We all know who commits terrorism
in "that capital T way," and it's not people named Joseph Stack.

Contrast
the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely
dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to
Muslims. If a Muslim attacks a military base preparing to deploy soldiers to a war zone, that person is a Terrorist. If an American Muslim argues
that violence against the U.S. (particularly when aimed at military
targets) is justified due to American violence aimed at the Muslim
world, that person is a Terrorist who deserves assassination. And if
the U.S. military invades a Muslim country, Muslims who live in the
invaded and occupied country and who fight back against the
invading American army -- by attacking nothing but military targets --
are also Terrorists. Indeed, large numbers of detainees at Guantanamo
were accused of being Terrorists for nothing more than attacking
members of an invading foreign army in their country, including
14-year-old Mohamed Jawad, who spent many years in Guantanamo, accused (almost certainly falsely) of
throwing a grenade at two American troops in Afghanistan who were part
of an invading force in that country. Obviously, plots targeting
civilians for death -- the 9/11 attacks and attempts to blow up
civilian aircraft -- are pure terrorism, but a huge portion of the acts
committed by Muslims that receive that label are not.

In
sum: a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or
even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army,
are Terrorists. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government
building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a
Real Terrorist with a capital T -- not the kind who should be tortured
and thrown in a cage with no charges and assassinated with no due
process. Nor are Christians who stand outside abortion clinics and murder doctors and clinic workers.
Nor are acts undertaken by us or our favored allies designed to kill
large numbers of civilians or which will recklessly cause such deaths
as a means of terrorizing the population into desired behavioral change
-- the Glorious Shock and Awe campaign and the pummeling of Gaza.
Except as a means for demonizing Muslims, the word is used so
inconsistently and manipulatively that it is impoverished of any
discernible meaning.

All of this would be an
interesting though not terribly important semantic matter if not for
the fact that the term Terrorist plays a central role in our political
debates. It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S.
Government does. Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions,
military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance,
obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all
justified by the claim that it's only being done to "Terrorists," who,
by definition, have no rights. Even worse, one becomes a
"Terrorist" not through any judicial adjudication or other formal
process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the
Executive Branch. The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and
that's the end of that: uncritical followers of both political
parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he's a Terrorist
(by which they actually mean: he's been accused of being one, though
that distinction -- between presidential accusations and proof -- is
not one they recognize).

If we're really going to vest
virtually unlimited power in the Government to do anything it wants to
people they call "Terrorists," we ought at least to have a common
understanding of what the term means. But there is none. It's just
become a malleable, all-justifying term to allow the U.S. Government carte blanche to do whatever it wants to Muslims it does not like or who do not like it (i.e.,
The Terrorists). It's really more of a hypnotic mantra than an actual
word: its mere utterance causes the nation blindly to cheer on
whatever is done against the Muslims who are so labeled.

UPDATE:
I want to add one point: the immediate official and media reaction was
to avoid, even deny, the term "terrorist" because the perpetrator of
the violence wasn't Muslim. But if Stack's manifesto begins to attract
serious attention, I think it's likely the term Terrorist will be
decisively applied to him in order to discredit what he wrote. His
message is a sharply anti-establishment and populist grievance of the
type that transcends ideological and partisan divisions -- the
complaints which Stack passionately voices are found as common threads
in the tea party movement and among citizens on both the Left and on
the Right -- and thus tend to be the type which the establishment
(which benefits from high levels of partisan distractions and
divisions) finds most threatening and in need of demonization. Nothing
is more effective at demonizing something than slapping the Terrorist
label onto it.