COMMENT Exploding the
'terrorist' neuron bomb By Ian
Williams
What do Nelson Mandela, Michael
Collins, Archbishop Makarios, Menachim Begin,
Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Shamir, Eamon DeValera and
Jomo Kenyatta have in common, apart from having
being heads of state?
As everybody knows,
but few remember, they were all vilified as
"terrorists" by the British or American
authorities.
Ronald Reagan branded
Mandela's African National Congress a terrorist
organization - and to be fair, it did commit some
terrorist acts, while the ancestors of Likud blew
up the King David Hotel, assassinated the highest
British official in the Middle East during
the war against the Nazis,
and gunned down United Nations representative
Count Folke Bernadotte for trying to negotiate a
peace settlement.
I have been on several
Fox and MSNBC shows recently where the hosts
admitted that Israel is failing in Lebanon, and
that it was a mistake to begin the invasion, not
least because there is no exit strategy. But then
they will round on me because I will not describe
Hezbollah as "terrorist". In fact I use the same
formula that British diplomats (in the better days
of a more independent foreign policy) used: "A
group that sometimes commits terrorist acts."
Needless to say, this does not satisfy pro-Israeli
anchormen - in fact, it gives them an excuse to
grandstand their fury.
Their use of the
concept illustrates the reason for my refusal.
Words like "terrorism" and "terrorist" are no
longer definitions - they are evasions, often
deliberate, of vital issues, no more so than in
the "war on terror".
This is not merely
sloppy use of vocabulary. It is precisely targeted
phrasing and intended to terrorize dissent.
Especially in the binary, Manichaean mindset of
the US and Likudnik Israel, once a group has been
labeled "terrorist" it becomes the epitome of evil
and to suggest that any of their arguments have
any justice makes one a terrorist supporter. Using
these words shuts down the higher cerebral
functions of many of the listeners.
Of
course, it is difficult to be dispassionate about
blood and dismembered bodies, but in the interests
of preventing more of the same, we should take a
step backwards.
According to Kofi Annan,
who was trying to get governments to agree on a
definition at the United Nations last year, an act
is terrorism "if it is intended to cause death or
serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants
with the purpose of intimidating a population or
compelling a government or an international
organization to do or abstain from doing any act."
This was, incidentally, also the phrasing used by
the first Chair of the Security Council Committee
on Terrorism, UK Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock.
It is concise and precise - and clearly
excludes much of what Israel, the US and other
governments have tried to brand as terrorism.
For years Israelis have called Palestinian
leaders terrorists, because they did not want to
deal with them or indeed with any of the claims of
the people they represented. In recent weeks,
Israeli forces have kidnapped some 38 elected
Palestinian representatives, because they deemed
them "terrorists". Hamas and Hezbollah are
"terrorists" and no one should talk to them, no
matter how many Palestinians or Lebanese vote for
them and support them.
The abuse of the
concept has reached its nadir in the amorphous
"war on terror", which currently covers any
military operations that the US, Israel, Russia,
and anyone else trying to jump on the bloody
bandwagon, should wish to undertake, not to
mention any rolling back of civil liberties and
international law that it entails. Dead
dissidents, or even just passers-by, from Chechnya
to Xinjiang, from Uzbekistan to Gaza, Abu Ghraib
to south Lebanon, become posthumous terrorists as
soon as their killing is reported. It was
under the guise of the "war on terror" that Iraq
was invaded. The weapons of mass destruction were
a legal distraction: for most Americans the real
justification of the war was the absolute fiction
that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11
attacks. And interestingly, under the fog of the
"war on terror", American troops have now pretty
much abandoned Afghanistan, the host country of
uncaught Osama bin Laden and the one place where
it was justifiable, and handed over operations to
NATO.
Simply labeling groups as
"terrorist" and demonizing those who stop to think
more deeply about it stops odious comparisons that
may challenge prevailing prejudices.
For
example, I was on a radio show some weeks after
the indisputably terrorist attack on the World
Trade Center (WTC), which I had lived close to and
watched in real time. The host asked about
progress at the UN in adopting a definition of
terrorism. I was explaining the difficulties and
went out on a limb - "you know there were hundreds
of brave firemen and police who died in the Center
- and how many of them do you think had attended
NorAid dinners, raising funds for bombings in
London?" (NorAid advertises itself as "Irish
Americans working for a united and free Northern
Ireland.) Luckily he did not explode, but stopped
in his tracks to think about it - "That means that
they were supporting terrorism too!" he exclaimed
as revelation hit him. Of course, if they had been
raising funds for Hamas, they would probably have
been in prison instead of rescuing people in the
towers.
But even here, there is room for
clear thinking. Under the prospective UN
definition, IRA attacks against security forces
may have been criminal, but they were not
terrorist actions. A telephoned warning usually
preceded even the IRA bombs on civilian targets.
Sadly, however, the IRA made such a mess of the
warnings so often that their campaign carried an
inevitability of deaths and injuries that
certainly put it inside Annan's definition.
So, while it certainly was not the
cleverest action that Hezbollah has perpetrated,
taking two Israeli soldiers prisoner was not
terrorism, although raining Katyusha rockets
indiscriminately down on civilians certainly is a
form of it.
But how is that different from
Israeli planes and artillery killing civilians in
Lebanon or for that matter in Gaza? Israel claims
that the civilian deaths are collateral damage of
attacks on Hezbollah, but apart from the morality
and legality, the math defies these excuses.
Current Israeli deaths run roughly one civilian
dead for one military. The far higher Lebanese
casualties are running at around 10 civilian dead
(including three children) for every claimed
Hezbollah victim. The continuing nature of those
casualties suggests, as Kofi Annan told the
Security Council last week, that there is a
"pattern of breaches of international law".
Committing terrorism takes a fanatical
worldview: the casualties are either guilty by
association - as implied by al-Qaeda for those
working in the WTC, or sadly necessary sacrifices
on the altar of a better world. Insofar as they
have any rationality, acts of terror are often
predicated on the stupidity of the authorities who
can be relied upon to create support for the
perpetrators with widespread repression and
retaliation.
In that sense, Hezbollah's
capture of the two Israeli soldiers, whether or
not it was terrorism in the UN definition, has
been spectacularly successful. Israel began the
war on the moral high ground, in the West at
least. It has taken a month of concentrated
viciousness and incompetence to turn the tide of
public opinion.
Israel's retaliation has
brought overwhelming Lebanese and Arab support for
Hezbollah, and has in one short month reversed
Israel's diplomatic gains across the world while
totally isolating the US and Tony Blair.
One might add that Osama bin Laden's
bloody assault on the WTC has had precisely the
same effect on a global scale. From a position of
overwhelming global public sympathy and support,
the Bush administration's reactions with the "war
on terror" have alienated the rest of the world to
the extent that China is now much more popular in
many countries polled.
Mesmerized by the
word "terrorism", as I said, it appears that the
higher mental faculties, never really in top gear,
of the US administration have been totally
paralyzed. But that is no reason for the rest of
us to succumb.
Ian Williams is
author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military
Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books,
New York.
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