A word from the wise

Editor’s note: It always helps in times like these to talk to Paul Greenberg. Or at least listen to him. Our former editor is not around any longer—at least not in this world—so the best we can do is read him. Again and again. After the shocking news out of Israel bled into the papers over the weekend, the details started bleeding out early this week. The terrorists based in Gaza had slaughtered babies and grandmothers, and have taken an untold number of Israelis hostage. And the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gave strict guidelines to reporters not to use the loaded term “terrorist” in their coverage, because it’s too “heavily politicized.” We were about to go on a rampage that wouldn’t elevate anything or anybody when we decided to consult Paul again. This is an editorial that he wrote in July 2005. To continue this introduction would reduce the number of words from him. So without further ado . . . .

It’s taken us a while to understand, but watching the BBC the other night—and we’ve been glued to its nightly newscast since the bombings in London—it finally came to us, the difference between a terrorist and an insurgent. At least in the BBC stylebook.

When suicide bombers blow Englishmen to smithereens, it’s a “terror attack.’’ But when they blow up Iraqis, they’re insurgents. It’s apparently not their tactics that distinguish terrorists from insurgents but geography. Or maybe just the identity of the victims.

Even in this brave new permissive world, the one dirty word that remains banned on BBC is, if you’ll pardon the expression, terrorist.

Although now and then some honest announcer may forget himself and use the forbidden word instead of “militant.” At least if the victims are British.

We’re all Londoners now, after 7/7, just as we were all New Yorkers after 9/11. And Madrillenos after 3/11. At least for a little while. Till we start bickering again. What the BBC hasn’t yet grasped is that we’re all Israelis and Iraqis, too, and that all of us are in terror’s sights, whether it strikes in London or New York,

Bali or Casablanca, at a theater in Moscow or a school in Beslan. They’re all in it together, these killers, whatever their particular branch of the same murderous fanaticism.

And the victims, whether they were British or Spanish or American or Russian or Australian, are together now too, in our memory. Some of us are determined not to forget them, or air-brush how they died by using tactful terms for their murderers. The BBC’s American cousin, NPR, prefers the term “militants” to describe these bastards. But our favorite euphemism comes from Reuters, which once referred to the kind of savages who threaten to behead their captives in Iraq as “activists.”

There will always be those who dare not risk offending by calling a terrorist a terrorist, who would much prefer to overlook the gore and just go about their business, maybe even muttering something about how those people have been killing each other for thousands of years, and it’s certainly no business of ours to interfere, and it can’t happen here … .

But it did. On Sept. 11, 2001. It will happen again, perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere. Wherever it does, we’re all in this together whether we want to be or not.

But slowly, painfully slowly, most of us are coming to realize the cowardice of such a course, and even to call evil evil. Wherever it strikes—London or New York, Baghdad or Jerusalem.

This war on terror is being waged not on behalf of one nation or even group of nations but in defense of civilization itself, of the idea that there are some things, as the Brits would say, that are not done, that will not be politely tolerated, that constitute an attack on human decency itself. Like blowing up crowded buses. Or crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. Or leaving bombs at nightclubs and restaurants and on the subway. Or blowing up a school full of children.

Whenever you think these killers have gone as low as they can, they go lower. Wednesday in Baghdad, some GIs at a checkpoint were handing out candy and smiley-faced keychains to a bunch of neighborhood kids when a speeding car appeared and plowed into them all, then exploded.

Parents heard the shattering explosion and raced out to discover the worst—children’s mangled, bloodied bodies strewn on the street. Up to 27 people, including an American soldier, were killed by the blast in Jadida, a lower-class residential district. At least 70 people were injured, a newborn and three U.S. soldiers among them.

Children’s slippers lay piled near the blast crater not far from the remains of a child’s bicycle as blood pooled in the street.

Twelve of the dead were 13 or younger, and six were between 14 and 17 … .

—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Page 1, July 14, 2005.

Tell us again that these people are lawful combatants entitled to prisoner-of-war status. Even if they wear no uniforms, kill men, women and children indiscriminately, honor no rules of engagement or laws of war, and represent no state that can be held accountable for their crimes. Tell us again that they are “insurgents.” Or militants. Or, yes, activists.

Tell us again that we must concentrate on the root causes of terrorism— poverty and ignorance—rather than go after the terrorists themselves. No need to emphasize the education and sophistication, the privileged background and technical knowledge, of the skyjackers who seized control of those airliners September 11th and turned them into instruments of carnage.

Tell us again that it’s all America’s fault, that if we had not invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, or overthrown the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s bloody tyranny, that none of this would be happening. Again, no need to go into detail—and review how many of these atrocities were committed before the United States struck back, and how many years this country did little but mark time while our troops were ambushed . . . . The World Trade Center was first attacked back in 1993, remember? . . . .

It was not until Pearl Harbor that most Americans realized we were at war not just with one treacherous enemy that had struck without warning, but with a worldwide ideology that threatened not just our democracy but democracy itself.

Only then did it dawn on most of us, as Nazi Germany and fascist Italy got in on the act, too, that they’re all in this together. Even then a few isolationists still held out, explaining that it was really a conspiracy, that Roosevelt had somehow cleverly maneuvered the Japanese into destroying the American fleet, that if only we had minded our own business, that the Versailles Treaty had really been unjust, you know, that the British were dragging us into this war, that it was all the Jews’ fault … .

The let’s-not-be-beastly-to-the-terrorists crowd is still out there, even if the latest horror has momentarily shamed some of them into silence. If they’re quiet for now, they’ll surface soon enough once the dead are buried, maybe even before.

You can be sure that even now, somewhere deep in Noam Chomsky territory, somebody’s working on a pamphlet, a speech, a blog, an email, or maybe a book that will explain it all, and it’ll be a best-seller, too, at least in Paris. It’ll explain how the Anglo-Saxons brought this on themselves, how these child-killers are but a natural reaction against the American hegemon, how it was the CIA or maybe the Mossad that really attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon . . .

But fewer and fewer of us seem able to take them, or the BBC, very seriously these days. Not all the words in the world can justify the murder of a child.