Defining Terrorism
The classic definition of "terrorism" is the use of violence against civilians to achieve a political goal. But the word ultimately has been transformed into a geopolitical insult. If "our" side is the target, it's "terrorism," even if it's a case of local militants attacking an occupying military force. Yet, when "our" side is doing the killing, it is anything but "terrorism."
So, for instance, when Palestinians trapped in the open-air prison called Gaza fire small missiles at nearby Israeli settlements, that is decried as "terrorism" because the missiles are indiscriminant. But in 1983, when the Reagan administration lobbed artillery shells from the USS New Jersey into Lebanese villages (in support of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon), that was not "terrorism."
Yet, when Lebanese militants responded to the U.S. shelling by driving a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine base at the Beirut airport, killing 241 American troops, that was widely deemed "terrorism" in the American news media, even though the victims weren't civilians. They were military troops belonging to a country that had become a participant in a civil war.
As a Washington-based reporter for the Associated Press then, I questioned the seeming bias that the wire service was showing in its selective use of the word "terrorist." A senior AP executive responded to my concerns with a quip, "Terrorist is the word that follows Arab."
Working journalists understood that it was an unwritten rule to apply the word "terrorism" liberally when the perpetrators were Muslims but avoid the term when describing actions by the United States or its allies. At such moments, the principle of objectivity went out the window.
Eventually, the American press corps developed such an engrained sense of this double standard that unrestrained moral outrage would pour forth when acts of "terrorism" were committed by U.S. enemies, but a studied silence -- or a nuanced concern -- would follow similar crimes by the United States or its allies.
So, when President George W. Bush carried out his "shock and awe" assault on Iraq, there was no suggestion that the destruction might be an act of terror because it was specifically designed to intimidate the Iraqis. Bush then followed up with a brutal invasion that has since resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.
Many Muslims and others around the world denounced Bush's Iraq invasion as "state terrorism," but such a charge was considered far outside the mainstream debate in the United States. Instead, Iraqi insurgents have been labeled "terrorists" when they attack U.S. troops inside Iraq.
This double standard then reinforces the notion that "only Muslims" commit acts of "terrorism," because the Western news media, by practice, almost never applies the t-word to non-Muslims. By contrast, it is both easy and expected to attach the word to Muslim groups held in disfavor by the U.S. and Israeli governments, i.e. Hamas and Hezbollah.
Islamophobe Hearings
This double standard has been on display this year with Rep. Peter King's Homeland Security Committee hearings on the "radicalization" of American Muslims. King has refused to expand his investigation to include what appears to be the new rising threat from Christian Right "radicalization."
Much like the Norway slaughter, a number of recent examples of domestic terrorism have emanated from the Right's hostility toward multiculturalism and other policies of the modern American state.
Recent cases of domestic terrorism have included the gunning down of presumed liberals at a Unitarian Church in Kentucky; violent attacks on gynecologists who perform abortions; the killing of a guard at Washington's Holocaust Museum; and the shooting of a Democratic congresswoman and her constituents in Arizona.
From Breivik's manifesto urging European Christians to rise up against Muslim immigrants and liberal politicians who tolerate multiculturalism, it is clear that he was largely inspired by anti-Muslim rhetoric that pervades the American Right and has surfaced in ugly campaigns to prevent mosques from being built across the country or even an Islamic community center that was deemed to be too close to 9/11's Ground Zero.
Rep. King's hearings were inspired by the work of noted Islam-basher Steven Emerson, whose Investigative Project on Terrorism has sought to link the locations of mosques to the incidence of terrorism cases. Emerson, who has close ties to Israel's Likud and American neocons, also was a key figure in the campaign to block the Islamic community center near Ground Zero.
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