Isn’t It Time to Define Terrorism and Terrorists?

President Obama is trying his darnest to find the default definition of terrorism by declaring that the term, “War on Terrorism,” be abolished in his administration. Too bad the popular media and the opposition party won’t go along for the moment until we can define who, what, where, and when the term should be used.

It’s too much to ask of the media and others to stop using terms like the war on terrorism and labeling individuals as terrorists in the absence of an agreed up definition of these terms.

When I used to tell my students in the first years of the new decade that America gave birth to the modern concept of using terrorism to defeat the British you could hear the yowls of protest all across the campus and out the doors of my classroom. “Americans were never terrorists,” they would shout at me, almost in unison, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. They were our heroes. But, in the context of not marching out to the battlefield with pawns ready to die for the cause but, instead shooting from behind rocks and trees at the hated British redcoats, the new patriots were terrorists, and the British wasted no time calling them that exactly.

Yesterday’s terrorists can be, and often are, depending on who wins the ultimate battle for control of the state or territory, today’s revolutionary heroes. Think about Mao and Castro and Menachem Begin, former Israeli Prime Minister who helped bomb the King David Hotel killing nearly 100 before Israel was a state. They were all labeled terrorists at one time or another in their careers as revolutionary heroes to their own people.

In the United States, it is way too easy to call a foreigner of Arab background or of Islamic belief a terrorist, even without a shred of evidence. Yet, there is an inclination to disbelieve that any American can be a terrorist unless identified with an Islamic movement such as al Qaeda. Recent history in the United States shows that Americans are very reluctant to call the alleged killer of Dr. Tiller, Scott Roeder, a terrorist. Nor will Americans call Timothy McVey a terrorist or the Atlanta bomber, Eric Rudolph, a terrorist, or any of the other politically motivated Americans who use violent methods to reverse the political fortunes of their causes. These people are, after all, Americans, no matter what their political causes may be.

We need a better definition to identify individuals and organizations who use violence as a means to an end, regardless of their national background or religious beliefs. In the meanwhile, we should follow Obama’s example and tamp down the indiscriminate use of the term terrorist until such time as we know definitively what the label really means!

(This post is also on The BackChannel blog.)

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