Thinking Critically about Terrorism in the Media

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa once said, 'We have wondered why it was that Dr. Savimbi's Unita in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua were "freedom fighters," lionized especially by President Reagan's White House and the conservative right wing of the United States of America, whereas our liberation movements such as the Pan-African Congress were invariably castigated as terrorist movements.' Dr. Savimbi is a freedom fighter and Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Movement (PLO) is a terrorist movement, but the Shah of Iran is a statesman. Mandela is a statesman, but so is Saddam Hussein. Hezbollah is a terrorist movement, and Iran supports terrorism, but Arafat is a statesman. The Contras are freedom fighters, and Syria is on the list of states supporting terrorism. Osama Bin Laden is a freedom fighter and Arafat is a terrorist, again. General Musharraf is a statesman, but Saddam now supports terrorist movements. The Irish Republican Army is a terrorist movement, the Taliban are statesmen, but Bin Laden is now a terrorist. Arafat is a statesman, again, but the Taliban are terrorists. Ariel Sharon and the king of Saudi Arabia are statesmen, while Hezbollah is still a terrorist movement. For those of us who get our news from the mainstream media like CNN and the BBC, it is difficult enough to keep track of the shifting and often contradictory images and sound bites used to describe complex political events, so how, in such a climate, can we ever learn to think critically about terrorism?

One way is to engage in closer, comparative study of events. In my secondary social studies methods courses, I do a unit about primary sources that emphasizes critical thinking. We begin by reading several news reports about a botched Israeli commando raid in southern Lebanon on 23 February 1999, which resulted in several Israeli casualties. Using the Nexis/Lexis database, we found four different reports filed within hours of the initial incident, and we studied the language each used to describe the incident. Israeli radio reported that its soldiers were on an 'initiated operational activity,' and that they were killed 'in exchanges of fire with terrorists.' Radio Lebanon reported that 'Islamic Resistance units' had 'intercepted' an 'Israeli commando force' inside southern Lebanon. The Chinese state news service described the incident as an 'Israeli commando unit' trying to 'penetrate the areas' in southern Lebanon, but that they were met by 'strong resistance' from 'Lebanese guerrillas.' The Boston Globe reported that the Israeli casualties resulted from 'clashes' with 'pro-Iranian Hezbollah guerrillas.' Through further research we learn that Hezbollah was indeed resisting an illegal military occupation of southern Lebanon, from which the Israelis withdrew in May 2000.

Each time I teach this lesson, it leads us in many interesting directions, some times to discussions about the foundation of Israel and the question of Palestine, and other times about the reliability of various news media. But one discussion that consistently returns each time is the vocabulary and imagery used by state power to describe resistance to military aggression. Although Israel is consistently condemned by the United Nations for its illegal occupation of Lebanese and Palestinian territories, the Israeli state defines the actions of anyone who resists that occupation as 'terrorism.' Whatever the circumstances, by definition the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance are invariably termed 'terrorist movements.' This is partly to dehumanize them, but also to justify the arbitrary use of state power. That train of thought usually leads us to further investigations of similar ways that state power defines how we understand the world, and students begin to unravel the legacy of 'terrorism' as a highly politicized term in public discourse, whether in the context of the Cold War or various national liberation movements.

Palestine is an important case study for critical thinking about terrorism. The Israelis consistently depict as 'terrorism' all Palestinian resistance to an illegal military occupation. The use of the word 'terrorism' to describe a bombing of a cafe in an Israeli town may be accurate, but it gets more difficult to apply the term when the targets of such attacks are military, and it is even less credible to describe as terrorism the Palestinian resistance against Israeli tanks and bulldozers rolling over their homes. The Palestinians have an internationally recognized right to resist the Israeli occupation of their land and the destruction of their homes, as well as Israeli attacks upon ambulances and journalists, the massacring of families such as those in Sabra and Shatila, and the imprisonment of young men without charges. In this context, Israel is practicing 'state terrorism,' although the news media never make that distinction. Left unqualified in this way, 'terrorism' becomes a politically charged term. When the American media use this term to portray opponents of American allies, they do a grave injustice to the English language, and a greater injustice to the cause of diplomacy including any measures that can be enacted to end ongoing conflict in Palestine.

We need to think critically about how it is, for example, that the state of Israel, which has a long and well-documented history of aggression against Palestine, has come to be seen as the main victim of terrorism. Critical thinking can involve the need to look at the purposes served by such reversals, and who gets to define 'terrorism' and what is left out of that definition. Terrorism is often a self-serving intellectual construct that is hidden from view by its incessant politicized use. Most recently, its meaning has been hijacked by the United States, which began to use the word regularly in the 1970s to describe various forms of Third World nationalism, and Israel, which has insisted on defining Palestinians as terrorists for resisting the occupation. In the so-called 'information age' power is in words and images. What we are seeing in the world now is the aggressors framing their victims as 'terrorists.' But for the purposes of critical thinking, we need to sometimes separate the realities on the ground from the way we talk about things, otherwise we may contribute to propagandizing ourselves by normalizing definitions and concepts that actually have no agreed upon meaning.

Because it has no agreed upon public definition, 'terrorism' can be used for a variety of purposes and the meaning can be adjusted as needed. Sometimes it means 'anybody who gets in our way,' and other times it may refer to somebody who resists colonization or other forms of invasion or aggression. A good example is the image of Yasser Arafat. For years, the Americans and the Israelis refused to call him anything but a 'terrorist.' After the 1993 Oslo Accords, he became a 'statesman.' However, his new title was contingent upon him terrorizing Islamic and leftist activists, which is why the Israelis gave the PLO guns and allowed them to build prisons and bunkers. But that plan did not work, since it is hard to shoot your brothers and cousins when the real enemy is the occupation and its injustices, so then we see Arafat stripped of the robes of a statesman and unceremoniously returned to his previous garb as a terrorist, with some even calling for his assassination. However, once Arafat's services as a local policeman were needed, the American and Israeli media once again dropped the terrorist appellation. In this context, then, what is a terrorist? It is what Israel and America say it is.

Since 11 September 2001, the naming and blaming game has gotten quite absurd. After President Bush declared a 'war on terrorism,' whatever that is, every two-bit dictator and repressive regime around the world wanted to reign in its opposition under the rubric of 'fighting terrorism.' In addition to accepting the assumption that anything happening in the world today against the US or its allies are acts of terrorism, various governments, friend or foe, began taking advantage of this to disguise their own agendas of violating the human rights of people within their borders. In China, for example, the government has taken to describing nationalists in its ongoing ethnic and religious conflicts in the northern territories as 'terrorists,' making sure the point is taken by stressing that they are allied with Alqaeda. The Philippine government, which has long been struggling with religious and ethnic nationalism in its southern islands, quickly joined the 'war on terrorism' by inviting U.S. commandos into a region that has seen American imperial intervention since the nineteenth century. Regional geopolitical problems become linked to a perceived 'global threat' of 'terrorism.' One could extend this observation back to the Cold War, when any form of Third World nationalism promoting a leftist agenda was termed 'terrorism' by the Americans, and the Soviet Union was the main 'sponsor of terrorism.' Meanwhile, American-backed terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere became freedom fighters. Further back, one could trace a legacy of 'bandits' and 'pirates,' the 'terrorists' of the nineteenth century. Zooming forward to the present, we find most recently that the enemies of America and Israel, such as Libya and Syria--themselves designated as states supporting terrorism--have labelled as 'terrorists' any and all who resist their oligarchic kleptocracies, bringing the concept to full circle in its gloriously tragic absurdity.

In addition to justifying the self-serving policies and explaining the aggressive actions of state power, terrorism serves other purposes. America has always needed an 'evil other' in opposition to its good self. The 'evil other' in history has taken on many names and shapes, from despots, pirates, and bandits, to communists and terrorists. In Western civilization, which is ferociously dichotomous, there has always been a necessity to define through opposition, and, therefore, a 'terrorist' or some other nefarious character--real or imagined--has actually become necessary for the maintenance of a Western self-image. This can be traced back to the Crusades, and carried forward through the Enlightenment, the Age of Imperialism, and into the twentieth century. In this framework, Muslims are not singled out as terrorists, because other peoples at other times have suffered the same labelling, which always serves the power interest of the time and place. Of course, the question can be asked as to why people so readily accept an image of Muslim terrorists today. This has a lot to do with the legacy of the Crusades in the Christian West and several decades of anti-Arab propaganda on behalf of Israel in America.

In a bid for unipolar world domination after the fall of communism, America has been trying to bring various sorts of stubborn holdouts into its sphere of influence. This is what the World Trade Organization and other big financial entities are trying to do, much like the Marshall Plan did after World War II. Islam is feared not so much for attention grabbing buzzwords like 'terrorism' and 'fundamentalism,' since the West has always had much more virulent strains of both; what is feared is that Islam has its own epistemology, its own way of seeing the world, its own outlook that differs in many crucial ways from the liberal Western outlook being propagated by the Americans. And Islam is not alone in this; there are other alternative visions out there, too, with some coming from large states like China and India, but many others from stateless indigenous peoples. Western civilization is now insecure of itself, of its institutions, its military tactics, its self-image, its education, its economy, and many other areas, which is further compounded by national demographic power shifting away from the dominant white Christian majorities. There is also a profound insecurity in the Western world that the rest of the planet is slowly waking up to see modernity, globalization, and neoliberalism as destructive and unsustainable moments in human history, soon to pass away of their own accord. This is the real fear, a fear of self-destruction and implosion, but it is much easier to try and blame these essentially internal and structural problems on some vague external enemy. Enter the terrorists, or the anarchists, or the communists, or whatever other heinous monster one can possibly conjure, who serve to bolster dwindling Western self-righteousness.

What is really going on, then, is a form of self-definition by using the other as a proxy. So, for instance, with Machiavelli the image of 'oriental despotism' was central to the method in his celebrated treatise on politics. The Medieval Catholic Church used images of 'Muslim depravity' as a way to define the purity of Christianity. Enlightenment secularists like Voltaire used negative constructs of Islam as a way to discredit religion in general. During the Victorian era, when Europeans were uptight about sexuality, artists and painters discovered the Turkish harem and the seraglio as an imaginary space for desire and lust that they could vent through art. The distance of the 'other' allowed a certain degree of acceptance toward public nudity in those times, since it was not 'our' nudity, it was that of those barbarous and depraved Turks. In this and many other ways, Islam has real utility. The list is long and interesting, but the theme remains the same: Western civilization, in the foundational moments of modernity, constructed its self-image in the opposing mirror of Islam as the eternal other. This was not based on any reality of Islam the way Muslims lived it at the time, which didn't matter. What mattered was that there was this other civilization out there that most people were aware of but which few really took the time to learn about, and that this mysterious other could be selfishly pressed into service toward a variety of cultural and political ends. Once one begins to think critically about Western history, Islam turns up everywhere as a proxy to work out internal dilemmas. Violence plays a central role in this self-definition. Western civilization has had an unbelievably violent heritage, one hundred million people killed in the twentieth century alone, but it cannot come to grips with that legacy. So, instead, we see a projecting of Western guilt and insecurity about violence onto others, which in many cases turn out to be Muslim 'terrorists.'

Of course, some people have tried to offer definitions of terrorism that are more substantive or definitive. One potential definition centers around the deceptively simple idea of 'killing or intimidating civilians for political or military gain.' However, that definition is dangerous, since one could then point to the terror bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the terror bombing of Dresden, or the terror bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia, to name just a few of the more well-known episodes. One could also mention the American sponsorship of various dictatorships and torture regimes in the Third World, which terrorize their own people to make way for 'progress' and 'development.' Thus, the above, more reasonable, definition of terrorism is not pursued or promoted, as it is more useful to the wielders of state power to maintain a fuzzy, unclear, ever-shifting, self-serving definition, and sell it hard and daily via the corporate media, from which most alternative and critical voices are excluded.

Further Reading
Furedi, F. (1994). The new ideology of imperialism: Renewing the moral imperative. London: Pluto Press.
Hentsch, T. (1992). Imagining the Middle East. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Herman, E. and O'Sullivan, G. (1989). The 'terrorism' industry: The experts and institutions that shape our view of terror. New York: Pantheon Books.
Kincheloe, J. L. and Steinberg, S. R. (Eds.), The miseducation of the West: How schools and media distort our understanding of the Islamic world. Westport, CT.: Praeger Publishers.
Progler, Y. (2008). Necessary terrorists: The politics of knowledge and scholarship. Penang, Malaysia: Citizens International.

[The foregoing essay was written by Yusef Progler and was previously published under the title 'Terrorism: Western definitions since 9/11' in J. L. Kincheloe and D. Weil (Eds.), Critical thinking and learning: An encyclopedia for parents and teachers (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, pp. 427-431). It has been slightly edited for reprinting on TV Multiversity. Some of the points in this essay are drawn from his extended essay, 'The Utility of Islamic Imagery in the West.']