What Terrorism Means
The invaluable Norm Geras has posted a piece on the Third International Congress of Terror Victims, which was held on February 13 in Valencia, Spain. The Congress is a gathering of survivors and family members of victims of terror attacks across the globe, including, among many others, the 9/11 assault on the US, the 2004 Beslan elementary school massacre, and the 2005 London transit bombings. In view of the extraordinary deference being shown to those coreligionists of the terrorists who are taking the Danish cartoon controversy as an opportunity to openly espouse mass murder (and, indeed, to commit murder), an event like this warrants more publicity, to say the least.
On opening day, a powerful speech was made by Israeli Arnold Roth, whose 15-year-old daughter Malki was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001. Roth makes many points worth reading — about the terrible human need for explanation that can impel one to find rationality where there is none, about the complete inability of the United Nations ever to take the side of the victims, about the fatal lack of clarity in the news media about the very meaning of the word “terrorism”. The following are excerpts:
…it is not beautiful to be a victim of terror. It is not romantic. It is not transcendental and it is not heroic. It is not like the movies. It is a nightmare and the deepest, most painful tragedy that most people will ever experience in their lives…
This process of becoming a victim makes very little sense to those of us who have experienced it. But the societies in which we live seek to understand terror. They try to get to the bottom of the anger and the hatred which animate terror by looking for root causes that explain it, that rationalize it. We have seen this done by journalists, by politicians, by community leaders, by our own neighbors…
A committee of the United Nations has been trying for the past nine years to write a convention against terrorism. For ordinary people like us, this does not sound like the most difficult thing for lawyers and diplomats to do. We know that terrorism means the deliberate targeting of civilians for injury and death. But there is an international association of states – I will not name it – comprising some 57 countries, nearly 30% of the 191 member states of the United Nations. For nine years, this association has frustrated the writing of the United Nations anti-terror convention by insisting that terrorism must be defined not by the nature of the act but by its purpose…
Their definition is not at all interested in how barbaric that act may be. Or how random. Or how defenseless and innocent the victims.
I am neither a diplomat nor a politician. But I have consulted with some academic experts and it is clear to me what this means. It means that terrorism when it is done for a bad cause is bad. Terrorism when it is done for a good cause is good. An individual citizen, a diplomat, a journalist or a country which holds to this view is not against terrorism at all but simply opposed to bad causes.
The effect of this regimented attention to semantics is that in its entire history the United Nations has failed time and time again to express an unequivocal condemnation of terrorism…
To dismiss this depressing chain of events by calling it a difference of opinion over definitions is to miss the point. There is an actual, practical life-and-death question here which we, assembled here in this hall, are uniquely placed to answer: Is it ever legitimate to target women, children and other noncombatants? For nations comprising some 30 per cent of the United Nations, the answer – tragically, astonishingly – is yes.…
Some of the men and women who murdered my child are in prison in Israel. Others are alive and well and free and active. Some of them have even become newly-elected members of parliament – not the parliament of my country but the parliament of the neighbour with whom we desperately want to live in peace.
Since the death of my daughter Malki, I read [newspapers] carefully and I pay close attention to the words [journalists] use. You may have noticed that the media seldom use the word “terrorist”. Instead, the men and women who kill innocent civilians in restaurants, who place bombs on train carriages and buses, who stab and beat children in kindergartens and playgrounds – these are called fighters, activists, protesters, militants, insurgents, anything except what they actually are: murderers, terrorists, barbarians.
I believe that this avoidance of plain and clear language happens because journalists, editors and publishers are unsure, themselves, of what terrorism is. They need to hear our voices. They need to understand – to really understand – that terrorism is not some kind of romantic struggle for dignity. It is not a noble alternative form of warfare. It is the purest, most physical expression of hatred and intolerance. [emphases added.]
Roth concludes by citing a line that appears in the Jewish Talmud:
“He who is compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate”.
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Read the whole thing.
Relative to your post, Gloria, you can find more straight talk about terrorism in a speech made by George Schultz way back in 1984. Here is an excerpt:
There has been, however, a more serious kind of confusion surrounding the issue of terrorism: the confusion between the terrorist act itself and the political goals that the terrorists claim to seek.
The grievances that terrorists supposedly seek to redress through acts of violence may or may not be legitimate. The terrorist acts themselves, however, can never be legitimate. And legitimate causes can never justify or excuse terrorism. Terrorist means discredit their ends.
Read all about it here.
Bernard, the next time you leave a comment, would you also please send me a note via email telling me you’ve commented? Your most recent comment was accidentally marked spam (sorry!) and now I’m concerned that you’ll be barred from commenting in the future. (There is no email address visible on your blog; hence this note.)
I’ll definitely email next time I comment. This comment doesn’t count, but it might serve as a test. Thanks for alerting me, Gloria.
Mr. (or Ms.? or perhaps it is Dr.? General?) Accessory,
You’ve written a great deal and it would be difficult to respond fully to everything at once. So for now, I’ll only address a point you raise towards the very end.
You write:
“when holy quran is being dropped in bath and islam is being hemeiliated and prophet mohammad too,do we expect them to just hug us and say hello democracy!!!?? now is that democracy?? thats terrorism”
Now, I don’t see why one would have a copy of the Koran in one’s bathroom, and even if one only wants to read it qua book and doesn’t see anything esp. holy about it, it doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose to drop it in a bath. At the same time, though, it’s not clear why anyone’s choice of democracy over some other form of government should be determined by whether there are people who drop Korans in baths. Surely there’s nothing about democracy that _requires_ the dropping of Korans in baths. (It is not, in other words, an essential property of democracy.) And though it might be said to be an implication of liberal democracy that, so long as the dropping of Korans in baths takes place within the privacy of people’s homes, the state not interfere with that activity, I’d wager that the _overwhelming majority_ of people in liberal democracies–whatever religion they adhere to, or even if they are not people of any faith at all–are not in the habit of dropping Korans in their baths. (Indeed, I’d wager that even the number of people dropping Korans in their baths _inadvertently_ is pretty small. It might be larger than the number of people doing so on purpose, but then one has to ask oneself how many people are likely to think of the Koran as good bath reading. Is it–to cite just one criterion for good bath reading–an especially soothing read? However highly one might regard the Koran, I can’t exactly see someone saying _that_ about it.)
There is another point that seems relevant here: contrary to the premise on the basis of which you seem to be operating, whereby something is either “democracy” or “terrorism,” some things fall into neither category. It’s not–believe me–that I’m any kind of expert on dropping Korans in baths, but to me it seems that that is _precisely_ a case of an action which is _neither_ democratic as such (though again: a democracy might _permit_ it), _nor_ an act of terrorism. Perhaps we will have to agree to disagree on that matter: I am sure that under the surface things are much, much less straightforward than they seem to me and that there is some–obscure to me now, but glaringly obvious if only I think about it, if only I broaden my understanding of logic a tiny, tiny bit–sense in which it is an undemocratic act of terrorism to drop the Koran in one’s bath. All I can do here is to assure you that I’ve thought hard about the issue. But I am always, _always_ learning.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, you naughty people, let Iran’s Supreme religious leader set you straight about a matter of vast–VAST–import:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3311189,00.html
[...] I suspect that quite a few people have, like me, recently had someone going by the name of “cell-phone-accessory” drop by and leave a comment on their blog. The comment is a rambling rant about terrorism. Its content is similar to that of a Guardian opinion piece, though admittedly the spelling and grammar are poorer. Gloria Salt has. She’s also had another commenter visit and engage bravely with c-p-a. [...]
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/21/africa/ME-GEN-Egypt-Controversial-Edict.php