Defining a Terrorist

One big news event of the last month that I haven’t mentioned at all in my blog is the mass slaughter perpetrated by a self-obsessed right-wing maniac in Norway. I don’t want to go into all the depressing details (which anyone who follows the news will know most of anyway), but there is one interesting discussion that the tragedy has given extra impetus to, and that is arguments about the definition of a “terrorist” and the tendency in recent years to associate the term exclusively with Muslims, an issue I've touched on briefly in the past. This article summarizes the debate well, but I’d like to add a few thoughts as well.

First of all, the assertion that someone like Brevik who commits terrorist acts cannot possibly be considered a Christian while someone like Osama bin Laden can be called a Muslim is obviously absurd. History is full of brutal acts committed in the name of Christian religion that easily fit that modern definition of terrorism. In modern times, religious sectarianism was the main motivation behind the terrorist acts of groups like the Catholic IRA and the Protestant unionists in Northern Ireland. Religion also has motivated crazy people in the US to murder doctors who provided abortions (or even make death threats against John Lennon for accurately stating that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus – in Britain at least, which is what he was talking about). Sure, Christians can argue that the people who committed such acts did so in violation of the true tenets of the religion, but then Muslims can make the same assertion about terrorists who profess to be Muslims. As for the argument that that the Quran itself is at fault, while there certainly are some passages in the Quran that can be used to support jihad, there are also many that clearly restrict the use of violence. And verses in the Bible have also been used to justify all sorts of reprehensible behavior. So either there can be such a thing as a “Christian terrorist” or there is no such thing as a “Muslim terrorist” either.

In fact, the term “terrorist” is widely misused. As an example, I recall that a number of years ago, the PKK (the Kurdish militant group that has been fighting the Turkish government) blew up a bridge as a truck full of Turkish soldiers was crossing it, killing them. A US official condemned this act as “terrorism”. But given that the target was soldiers who were on active duty and engaged in hunting down the PKK, this was not terrorism at all, but simply an ambush. While the PKK has certainly engaged in acts in the past that fit the definition of terrorism, in this case, the US was merely pandering to its Turkish allies by using the term. In fact, some of the Turkish government’s actions in this conflict should also be considered terrorism, as they involved arresting, torturing and killing civilians in an effort to frighten the Kurds and discourage them from supporting the PKK. Likewise, when Uyghur militants attack Chinese police, the Chinese government calls it terrorism, even though an attack on armed police officers is hardly terrorism in comparison to some of the actions the Chinese have engaged in to terrorize the Uyghurs and Tibetans. It could even be argued that the US has engaged in terrorism, such as in the firebombing of Dresden or the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. Whether or not these actions are called terrorism (I would at least define the firebombing of Dresden as terrorism), it is clear that nations can engage in terrorism as much as militant groups can, and often on a grander scale.

So while there is a lot of room for argument about what particular acts qualify as terrorism, it is obvious that the exclusive association of the term with radical Muslims is wrong and even dangerous, as it encourages a prejudice against Muslims in general that is all too common among some small-brained people in the West (and elsewhere). If nothing else, terrible events like the one that took place in Norway serve as reminder that radical Islamists do not have a monopoly on reprehensible political violence targeting civilians.