‘Terrorism’: A word we need to retire

So far this fall, one man rained down gunfire on a crowd of concertgoers in Las Vegas, killing 58 and injuring hundreds. Another deliberately drove a truck onto a bike path in downtown Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring many more. A third randomly shot and killed three people inside a Colorado Walmart. And a fourth entered a Texas church on a Sunday armed with an assault rifle, murdering 26 people and injuring scores.

Only one of these men was called a terrorist.

Mayor de Blasio denounced the truck murders as “a cowardly act of terror.” President Trump promptly tweeted about a “terrorist attack” (adding he might send the “animal” to Guantanamo).

To be perfectly clear, I’ve ridden on that same bike path with my fellow New Yorkers countless times. My thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their lives in this senseless act of violence, the injured, and all of their loved ones.

But amid all the carnage, we have to question why only one event is singled out as terrorism and, more importantly, whether any crime should be.

Defining terrorism in a legal sense is an infamously slippery undertaking, with well over a hundred definitions (and counting) in existence, and no consensus candidate.

The search for a commonsense definition fares no better. Does terrorism stand apart from other crimes in the casualties it exacts or wider fear it creates? Not necessarily. The truck attack claimed eight lives; last month’s Las Vegas attack took seven times more.

Is it that terrorism is politically motivated? Again, not so fast. The 2015 Charleston church shooter was driven, at least in part, by racist politics. His crimes were not prosecuted as terrorism.

That leaves us with the sort of fuzzy definition Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously arrived at in 1964, when trying to determine if a film was pornographic: “I know it when I see it.”

But that sort of understanding leaves lots to be desired, not least of all because it invites prejudice. In America today, the most significant factor that seems to determine if a crime is viewed as terrorism is whether the perpetrator identifies as Muslim. The fact that the driver of that truck exited the vehicle, reportedly shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is greater”), before being shot and arrested by police, appears to have sufficed for many, if not most, to consider him a terrorist.

That investigators allegedly recovered a note pledging allegiance to the Islamic State shouldn’t be the difference-maker, either. A last-minute pledge to a foreign organization by a troubled person is no more meaningful than the Charleston shooter’s proclamations about the Confederacy.

It might be tempting to conclude that the solution to the double standard is to use the terrorism designation more evenly, applying it more regularly to crimes like Charleston and Las Vegas.

Yet this carries its own problems. People typically use abstract concepts to foster deeper understanding of worldly phenomena. The opposite seems true of terrorism. The very invocation of the word serves to shut down more sophisticated analysis of the stew of personal, political and psychological factors that drove someone to kill. It also serves to silence those who might insist that anyone who stands accused of a crime, irrespective of the crime, should enjoy the full panoply of rights and protections that the criminal justice system is supposed to offer.

There’s another problem. By exceptionalizing as terrorism acts of violence committed by Muslims, officials justify an expansive and expensive domestic surveillance and security apparatus.

Year after year, the FBI cites counterterrorism as its top priority. The official narrative around terrorism also bolsters longstanding U.S. foreign policy and military intervention in many Muslim-majority countries and regions. That’s despite the fact that terrorism, so defined, is a smaller threat to Americans than many other forces.

The exceptional treatment of terrorism also advances the Islamic State’s interests. When mayors, governors, Presidents and prosecutors embrace and echo the Islamic State’s boasts of responsibility for the crimes of lone individuals, they provide ISIS with the promotion and publicity it so desperately craves and thrives on.

None of this is to minimize the horrific, criminal nature of acts like the one New Yorkers endured on Halloween. But unless and until we can get past the tword, debates will continue to generate more heat than light.