The trouble with labelling civilian massacres as ‘terrorism’
In a week saturated with blood, two particular events — one in Munich, Germany, and the other in Manbij, Syria — highlight deep problems with the way we use the concept of “terrorism:” a word flexibly applied to specially denounce some forms of violence, while others are left invariably invisible.
Last Friday’s mass shooting in Munich was rapidly recast as a “nonterrorist” incident as soon as any suspected connection with “Islamism” was discredited. David Ali Sonboly, it seems, was motivated by right-wing and anti-immigrant extremism rather than “Muslim radicalism;” and so he quickly became a “depressed loner” rather than a “terrorist.” As journalist Max Fisher observes in the New York Times: “When mass killers show even minor hints of affinity for jihadist groups, as they did in recent attacks in Orlando, Fla., and Nice, France, their actions are swiftly judged to be terrorism. But when their source of inspiration appears to be right-wing extremism, as (Munich’s police chief Hubertus) Andra speculated could be the case in Munich, they are often treated as disturbed loners.”
In Syria, also last week, another terrorizing act of violence that was not considered “terrorism:” U.S. airstrikes killed at least 73, and possibly more than 125, civilians near the city of Manbij. It was the deadliest U.S. assault on civilians so far in the war against Daesh (in which, according to the casualty monitoring project Airwars, a minimum of 1,513 civilians have been killed by the U.S.-led coalition). And yet, this strike failed to evoke the media attention or public castigation inspired by “terrorist” incidents in North America or Europe, even though it was likely more fatal than the Nice attack, which occurred just five days earlier. Perhaps this is because the deaths in Manbij were claimed to be “accidental” — although the moral distance between negligent and deliberate killings of civilians diminishes as the body count of Western governments continues to rise.
“If (terrorism) means the use of force against civilians to achieve a political goal, then that should include all such attacks on civilians, and not merely the ones launched by non-state actors,” human rights lawyer Noura Erakat points out. But instead, “the victims of state-led attacks are considered collateral damage, or unfortunate but necessary killings. This framework effectively diminishes the value of their lives, making it much easier for the world to tolerate excruciatingly high death tolls and absolve the states that caused them.”
The dominant framings of the attacks in Munich and Manbij reveal, yet again, the paradoxes and partiality of our language of “terrorism.” “Terrorism” is the violence inspired by apparently foreign ideologies of “jihadism,” but not the violence inspired by thoroughly domestic ideologies of hate and racism. “Terror- ism” is when they kill our civilians (or even our soldiers), but not when we kill theirs.
The term “terrorism” selectively delegitimizes and condemns certain sources of violence, while justifying ours committed in the name of fighting “terrorist enemies” around the world. But military operations against “terrorism” have only multiplied the violence they purport to be quelling.
As documented in the Global Terrorism Index 2015, produced by the independent think tank Institute for Economics and Peace, the “war on terror” has managed to produce a ninefold increase in the number of deaths from non-state “terrorism” per year — from 3,329 in 2000 to 32,685 in 2014. This terrifyingly meteoric rise should hardly come as a surprise, since war creates the conditions known to be conducive to “terrorist activity,” according to the Index: “political violence committed by the state and the existence of a broader armed conflict.”
Muslim populations outside the West have largely borne the burden of counterterrorism’s fruits of proliferating “terrorism:” 78 per cent of all lives lost to non-state “terrorism” in 2014 were in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, while 2.6 per cent of all deaths from “terrorism” since 2000 have occurred in the West (0.5 per cent excluding the attacks of 9-11).
Muslim populations have also largely borne the burden of the massive amounts of terror, destruction, and death involved in the “war on terror” itself — which has left entire countries in ruins and as many as 2 million people dead in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan alone. But we do not call this “terrorism;” rather, this violence is valorized as “terrorism’s” civilized antithesis.