What is terrorism?

Posted 12:26 PM by CMN
Terrorism: Theirs and Ours (A Presentation at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, October 12, 1998)

By Eqbal Ahmad

By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with
the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the
terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be
described, by 1944-45, as "freedom fighters." At least two Israeli Prime
Ministers, including Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the
books and posters with their pictures, saying "Terrorists, Reward This
Much." The highest reward I have noted so far was 100,000 British pounds on
the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist.

Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization,
occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has
been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, William
Safire of the New York Times, as the "Chief of Terrorism." That's Yasir
Arafat.

Now, on September 29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of
Yasir Arafat to the right of President Bill Clinton. To his left is Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Clinton is looking towards Arafat and
Arafat is looking literally like a meek mouse. Just a few years earlier he
used to appear with this very menacing look around him, with a gun
appearing menacing from his belt. You remember those pictures, and you
remember the next one.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. These
bearded men I was writing about in those days in The New Yorker, actually
did. They were very ferocious-looking bearded men with turbans looking like
they came from another century. President Reagan received them in the White
House. After receiving them he spoke to the press. He pointed towards them,
I'm sure some of you will recall that moment, and said, "These are the
moral equivalent of America's founding fathers". These were the Afghan
Mujahiddin. They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the Evil Empire.
They were the moral equivalent of our founding fathers!

In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes from the
American navy based in the Indian Ocean to kill Osama Bin Laden and his men
in the camps in Afghanistan. I do not wish to embarrass you with the
reminder that Mr. Bin Laden, whom fifteen American missiles were fired to
hit in Afghanistan, was only a few years ago the moral equivalent of George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson! He got angry over the fact that he has
been demoted from 'Moral Equivalent' of your 'Founding Fathers'. So he is
taking out his anger in different ways. I'll come back to that subject more
seriously in a moment.

You see, why I have recalled all these stories is to point out to you that
the matter of terrorism is rather complicated. Terrorists change. The
terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday
becomes the terrorist of today. This is a serious matter of the constantly
changing world of images in which we have to keep our heads straight to
know what is terrorism and what is not. But more importantly, to know what
causes it, and how to stop it.

The next point about our terrorism is that posture of inconsistency
necessarily evades definition. If you are not going to be consistent,
you're not going to define. I have examined at least twenty official
documents on terrorism. Not one defines the word. All of them explain it,
express it emotively, polemically, to arouse our emotions rather than
exercise our intelligence. I give you only one example, which is
representative. October 25, 1984. George Shultz, then Secretary of State of
the U.S., is speaking at the New York Park Avenue Synagogue. It's a long
speech on terrorism. In the State Department Bulletin of seven
single-spaced pages, there is not a single definition of terrorism. What we
get is the following:
Definition number one: "Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call
terrorism."
Definition number two is even more brilliant: "Terrorism is a form of
political violence." Aren't you surprised? It is a form of political
violence, says George Shultz, Secretary of State of the U.S.
Number three: "Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization."
Number four: "Terrorism is a menace to Western moral values."
Did you notice, does it tell you anything other than arouse your emotions?
This is typical. They don't define terrorism because definitions involve a
commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of
consistency. That's the second characteristic of the official literature on
terrorism.

The third characteristic is that the absence of definition does not prevent
officials from being globalistic. We may not define terrorism, but it is a
menace to the moral values of Western civilization. It is a menace also to
mankind. It's a menace to good order. Therefore, you must stamp it out
worldwide. Our reach has to be global. You need a global reach to kill it.
Anti-terrorist policies therefore have to be global. Same speech of George
Shultz: "There is no question about our ability to use force where and when
it is needed to counter terrorism." There is no geographical limit. On a
single day the missiles hit Afghanistan and Sudan. Those two countries are
2,300 miles apart, and they were hit by missiles belonging to a country
roughly 8,000 miles away. Reach is global.

A fourth characteristic: claims of power are not only globalist they are
also omniscient. We know where they are; therefore we know where to hit. We
have the means to know. We have the instruments of knowledge. We are
omniscient. Shultz: "We know the difference between terrorists and freedom
fighters, and as we look around, we have no trouble telling one from the
other." Only Osama Bin Laden doesn't know that he was an ally one day and
an enemy another. That's very confusing for Osama Bin Laden. I'll come back
to his story towards the end. It's a real story.

Five. The official approach eschews causation. You don't look at causes of
anybody becoming terrorist. Cause? What cause? They ask us to be looking,
to be sympathetic to these people. Another example. The New York Times,
December 18, 1985, reported that the foreign minister of Yugoslavia, you
remember the days when there was a Yugoslavia, requested the Secretary of
State of the U.S. to consider the causes of Palestinian terrorism. The
Secretary of State, George Shultz, and I am quoting from the New York
Times, "went a bit red in the face. He pounded the table and told the
visiting foreign minister, there is no connection with any cause. Period."
Why look for causes?

Number six. The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is
selective. We are to feel the terror of those groups, which are officially
disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of those groups of whom officials
do approve. Hence, President Reagan, "I am a contra." He actually said
that. We know the contras of Nicaragua were anything, by any definition,
but terrorists. The media, to move away from the officials, heed the
dominant view of terrorism.

The dominant approach also excludes from consideration, more importantly to
me, the terror of friendly governments. To that question I will return
because it excused among others the terror of Pinochet (who killed one of
my closest friends) and Orlando Letelier; and it excused the terror of Zia
ul-Haq, who killed many of my friends in Pakistan. All I want to tell you
is that according to my ignorant calculations, the ratio of people killed
by the state terror of Zia ul-Haq, Pinochet, Argentinian, Brazilian,
Indonesian type, versus the killing of the PLO and other terrorist types is
literally, conservatively, one to one hundred thousand. That's the ratio.

History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power and not to
weakness. Therefore, visibility has been accorded historically to dominant
groups. In our time, the time that began with this day, Columbus Day. The
time that begins with Columbus Day is a time of extraordinary unrecorded
holocausts. Great civilizations have been wiped out. The Mayas, the Incas,
the Aztecs, the American Indians, the Canadian Indians were all wiped out.
Their voices have not been heard, even to this day fully. Now they are
beginning to be heard, but not fully. They are heard, yes, but only when
the dominant power suffers, only when resistance has a semblance of
costing, of exacting a price. When a Custer is killed or when a Gordon is
besieged. That's when you know that they were Indians fighting, Arabs
fighting and dying.

My last point of this section - U.S. policy in the Cold War period has
sponsored terrorist regimes one after another. Somoza, Batista, all kinds
of tyrants have been America's friends. You know that. There was a reason
for that. I or you are not guilty. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan,
mujahiddin. El Salvador, etc.

Now the second side. You've suffered enough. So suffer more. There ain't
much good on the other side either. You shouldn't imagine that I have come
to praise the other side. But keep the balance in mind. Keep the imbalance
in mind and first ask ourselves, What is terrorism? Our first job should be
to define the damn thing, name it, give it a description of some kind,
other than "moral equivalent of founding fathers" or "a moral outrage to
Western civilization". I will stay with you with Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary: "Terror is an intense, overpowering fear." He uses terrorizing,
terrorism, "the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a
government." This simple definition has one great virtue, that of fairness.
It's fair. It focuses on the use of coercive violence, violence that is
used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce. And this definition is
correct because it treats terror for what it is, whether the government or
private people commit it.

Have you noticed something? Motivation is left out of it. We're not talking
about whether the cause is just or unjust. We're talking about consensus,
consent, absence of consent, legality, absence of legality,
constitutionality, absence of constitutionality. Why do we keep motives
out? Because motives differ. Motives differ and make no difference.

I have identified in my work five types of terrorism.
First, state terrorism. Second, religious terrorism; terrorism inspired by
religion, Catholics killing Protestants, Sunnis killing Shiites, Shiites
killing Sunnis, God, religion, sacred terror, you can call it if you wish.
State, church. Crime. Mafia. All kinds of crimes commit terror. There is
pathology. You're pathological. You're sick. You want the attention of the
whole world. You've got to kill a president. You will. You terrorize. You
hold up a bus. Fifth, there is political terror of the private group; be
they Indian, Vietnamese, Algerian, Palestinian, Baader-Meinhof, the Red
Brigade. Political terror of the private group. Oppositional terror.

Keep these five in mind. Keep in mind one more thing. Sometimes these five
can converge on each other. You start with protest terror. You go crazy.
You become pathological. You continue. They converge. State terror can take
the form of private terror. For example, we're all familiar with the death
squads in Latin America or in Pakistan. Government has employed private
people to kill its opponents. It's not quite official. It's privatized.
Convergence. Or the political terrorist who goes crazy and becomes
pathological. Or the criminal who joins politics. In Afghanistan, in
Central America, the CIA employed in its covert operations drug pushers.
Drugs and guns often go together. Smuggling of all things often go together.

Of the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the least important
in terms of cost to human lives and human property [Political Terror of
those who want to be heard]. The highest cost is state terror. The second
highest cost is religious terror, although in the twentieth century
religious terror has, relatively speaking, declined. If you are looking
historically, massive costs. The next highest cost is crime. Next highest,
pathology. A Rand Corporation study by Brian Jenkins, for a ten-year period
up to 1988, showed 50% of terror was committed without any political cause
at all. No politics. Simply crime and pathology. So the focus is on only
one, the political terrorist, the PLO, the Bin Laden, whoever you want to
take. Why do they do it? What makes the terrorist tick?
I would like to knock them out quickly to you. First, the need to be heard.
Imagine, we are dealing with a minority group, the political, private
terrorist. First, the need to be heard. Normally, and there are exceptions,
there is an effort to be heard, to get your grievances heard by people.
They're not hearing it. A minority acts. The majority applauds.

The Palestinians, for example, the superterrorists of our time, were
dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to 1968 they went to every court in the
world. They knocked at every door in the world. They were told that they
became dispossessed because some radio told them to go away - an Arab
radio, which was a lie. Nobody was listening to the truth. Finally, they
invented a new form of terror, literally their invention: the airplane
hijacking. Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled the world up by its ears. They
dragged us out and said, Listen, Listen. We listened. We still haven't done
them justice, but at least we all know. Even the Israelis acknowledge.
Remember Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, saying in 1970, 'There are
no Palestinians.' They do not exist. They damn well exist now. We are
cheating them at Oslo. At least there are some people to cheat now. We
can't just push them out. The need to be heard is essential. One motivation
there.

Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to strike out. You are
angry. You are feeling helpless. You want retribution. You want to wreak
retributive justice. The experience of violence by a stronger party has
historically turned victims into terrorists. Battered children are known to
become abusive parents and violent adults. You know that. That's what
happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back.
State terror very often breeds collective terror.

Do you recall the fact that the Jews were never terrorists? By and large
Jews were not known to commit terror except during and after the Holocaust.
Most studies show that the majority of members of the worst terrorist
groups in Israel or in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs, were
people who were immigrants from the most anti-Semitic countries of Eastern
Europe and Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the
Palestinians from the refugee camps are battered people. They become very
violent. The ghettos are violent internally. They become violent externally
when there is a clear, identifiable external target, an enemy where you can
say, 'Yes, this one did it to me'. Then they can strike back.

Example is a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized
Beirut hijacking of the TWA plane. After that hijacking, there were
hijacking attempts at nine different American airports. Pathological groups
or individuals modeling on the others. Even more serious are examples set
by governments. When governments engage in terror, they set very large
examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they engage in other sets
of examples.

Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim terrorism.
Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror. Those of you who are
familiar with revolutionary theory know the debates, the disputes, the
quarrels, the fights within revolutionary groups of Europe, the fight
between anarchists and Marxists, for example. But the Marxists have always
argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be
sociologically and psychologically selective. Don't hijack a plane. Don't
hold hostages. Don't kill children, for God's sake. Have you recalled also
that the great revolutions, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Algerian, the
Cuban, never engaged in hijacking type of terrorism? They did engage in
terrorism, but it was highly selective, highly sociological, still
deplorable, but there was an organized, highly limited, selective character
to it. So absence of revolutionary ideology that begins more or less in the
post-World War II period has been central to this phenomenon.

My final question is - These conditions have existed for a long time. But
why then this flurry of private political terrorism? Why now so much of it
and so visible? The answer is modern technology. You have a cause. You can
communicate it through radio and television. They will all come swarming if
you have taken an aircraft and are holding 150 Americans hostage. They will
all hear your cause. You have a modern weapon through which you can shoot a
mile away. They can't reach you. And you have the modern means of
communicating. When you put together the cause, the instrument of coercion
and the instrument of communication, politics is made. A new kind of
politics becomes possible.

To this challenge rulers from one country after another have been
responding with traditional methods. The traditional method of shooting it
out, whether it's missiles or some other means. The Israelis are very proud
of it. The Americans are very proud of it. The French became very proud of
it. Now the Pakistanis are very proud of it. The Pakistanis say, 'Our
commandos are the best.' Frankly, it won't work. A central problem of our
time, political minds, rooted in the past, and modern times, producing new
realities. Therefore in conclusion, what is my recommendation to America?

Quickly. First, avoid extremes of double standards. If you're going to
practice double standards, you will be paid with double standards. Don't
use it. Don't condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror,
El Salvadoran terror, on the one hand, and then complain about Afghan
terror or Palestinian terror. It doesn't work. Try to be even-handed. A
superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to
discourage terrorism in another place. It won't work in this shrunken world.

Do not condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them. Fight them. Punish
them. Please eschew, avoid covert operations and low-intensity warfare.
These are breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and drugs are bred
there. The structure of covert operations, I've made a film about it, which
has been very popular in Europe, called Dealing with the Demon. I have
shown that wherever covert operations have been, there has been the central
drug problem. That has been also the center of the drug trade. Because the
structure of covert operations, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Central
America, is very hospitable to drug trade. Avoid it. Give it up. It doesn't
help.

Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes. Try to look at causes
and solve problems. Do not concentrate on military solutions. Do not seek
military solutions. Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political
solutions. Diplomacy works.

Take the example of the last attack on Bin Laden. You don't know what
you're attacking. They say they know, but they don't know. They were trying
to kill Qadaffi. They killed his four-year-old daughter. The poor baby
hadn't done anything. Qadaffi is still alive. They tried to kill Saddam
Hussein. They killed Laila Bin Attar, a prominent artist, an innocent
woman. They tried to kill Bin Laden and his men. Not one but twenty-five
other people died. They tried to destroy a chemical factory in Sudan. Now
they are admitting that they destroyed an innocent factory, one-half of the
production of medicine in Sudan has been destroyed, not a chemical factory.
You don't know. You think you know.

Four of your missiles fell in Pakistan. One was slightly damaged. Two were
totally damaged. One was totally intact. For ten years the American
government has kept an embargo on Pakistan because Pakistan is trying,
stupidly, to build nuclear weapons and missiles. So we have a technology
embargo on my country. One of the missiles was intact. What do you think a
Pakistani official told the Washington Post? He said it was a gift from
Allah. We wanted U.S. technology. Now we have got the technology, and our
scientists are examining this missile very carefully. It fell into the
wrong hands. So don't do that. Look for political solutions. Do not look
for military solutions. They cause more problems than they solve.

Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international law. There
was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn't they go to it first to get their
warrant against Bin Laden, if they have some evidence? Get a warrant, then
go after him. Internationally. Enforce the U.N. Enforce the International
Court of Justice, this unilateralism makes us look very stupid and them
relatively smaller.

Q&A
The question here is that I mentioned that I would go somewhat into the
story of Bin Laden, the Saudi in Afghanistan and didn't do so, could I go
into some detail? The point about Bin Laden would be roughly the same as
the point between Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was accused and convicted of
encouraging the blowing up of the World Trade Center in New York City. The
New Yorker did a long story on him. It's the same as that of Aimal Kansi,
the Pakistani Baluch who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA
agents. Let me see if I can be very short on this. Jihad, which has been
translated a thousand times as "holy war," is not quite just that. Jihad is
an Arabic word that means, "to struggle." It could be struggle by violence
or struggle by non-violent means. There are two forms, the small jihad and
the big jihad. The small jihad involves violence. The big jihad involves
the struggles with self. Those are the concepts. The reason I mention it is
that in Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had
disappeared in the last four hundred years, for all practical purposes. It
was revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union
intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan,
which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity and launched a jihad there
against godless communism. The U.S. saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize
one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the Evil Empire. Money
started pouring in. CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world
recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the
early prize recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was
not only a Saudi. He was also a multimillionaire, willing to put his own
money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the
jihad against communism.

I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official
of whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I was talking to
him and said, 'Who are the Arabs here who would be very interesting?' By
here I meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said, 'You must meet Osama.' I
went to see Osama. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria,
from Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman. This fellow was an
ally. He remained an ally. He turns at a particular moment. In 1990 the
U.S. goes into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the holy place of
Muslims, Mecca and Medina. There had never been foreign troops there. In
1990, during the Gulf War, they went in, in the name of helping Saudi
Arabia defeat Saddam Hussein. Osama Bin Laden remained quiet. Saddam was
defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land of the kaba (the
sacred site of Islam in Mecca), foreign troops. He wrote letter after
letter saying, Why are you here? Get out! You came to help but you have
stayed on. Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His
mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier mission
was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan. See what I was saying earlier
about covert operations?

A second point to be made about him is these are tribal people, people who
are really tribal. Being a millionaire doesn't matter. Their code of ethics
is tribal. The tribal code of ethics consists of two words: loyalty and
revenge. You are my friend. You keep your word. I am loyal to you. You
break your word, I go on my path of revenge. For him, America has broken
its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood
loyalty has betrayed you. They're going to go for you. They're going to do
a lot more.

These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost. This is
why I said to stop covert operations. There is a price attached to those
that the American people cannot calculate and Kissinger type of people do
not know, don't have the history to know.