Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings “Terrorism” Again Shows It’s a Meaningless Propaganda Term

[kath]

Thought-provoking piece by Glenn Greenwald:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/19/refusal-call-charleston-shootings-terrorism-shows-meaningless-propaganda-term/

excerpts:

"In February 2010, a man named Joseph Stack deliberately flew his small airplane into the side of a building that housed a regional IRS office in Austin, Texas, just as 200 agency employees were starting their workday. Along with himself, Stack killed an IRS manager and injured 13 others.<snip> The attack had all of the elements of iconic terrorism, a model for how it’s most commonly understood: down to flying a plane into the side of a building. But Stack was white and non-Muslim. As a result, not only was the word “terrorism” not applied to Stack, but it was explicitly declared inapplicable by media outlets and government officials alike.
<snip>
By very stark contrast, consider the October 2014, shooting in Ottawa by a single individual, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, at the Canadian Parliament building. As soon as it was known that the shooter was a convert to Islam, the incident was instantly and universally declared to be “terrorism.” In sum, that this was a “terror attack” was mandated conventional wisdom before anything was known other than the Muslim identity of the perpetrator.<snip>

As it turns out, other than the fact that the perpetrator was Muslim and was aiming his violence at Westerners, almost nothing about this attack had the classic hallmarks of “terrorism.” In the days and weeks that followed, it became clear that Zehaf-Bibeau suffered from serious mental illness and “seemed to have become mentally unstable.” He had a history of arrests for petty offenses and had received psychiatric treatment. His friends recall him expressing no real political views but instead claiming he was possessed by the devil.

<snip>
Ample scholarship proves that the term “terrorism” is empty, definition-free and invariably manipulated. Harvard’s Lisa Stampnitzky has documented “the inability of researchers to establish a suitable definition of the concept of ‘terrorism’ itself.” The concept of “terrorism” is fundamentally plagued by ideological agendas and self-interested manipulation, as Professor Richard Jackson at the the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealand has explained: “most of what is accepted as well-founded ‘knowledge’ in terrorism studies is, in fact, highly debatable and unstable” and is “biased towards Western state priorities.” Remi Brulin is a scholar who specializes in the discourse of “terrorism” and has long documented that, from the start, it was a highly manipulated term of propaganda more than it was a term of fixed meaning — largely intended to justify violence by the West and Israel while delegitimizing the violence of its enemies.

<snip>
What is most amazing about all of this is that “terrorism” — a term that is so easily and frequently manipulated and devoid of fixed meaning — has now become central to our political culture and legal framework, a staple of how we are taught to think about the world. It is constantly invoked, as though it is some sort of term of scientific precision, to justify an endless array of radical policies and powers. Everything from the attack on Iraq to torture to endless drone killings to mass surveillance and beyond are justified in its name.

*********************
On edit -- sorry, for some reason I can't get those excerpts to post as a block quote.

[arcane1]

1. Yep, the word is not meant to describe acts. It's meant to justify policy n/t

[jaysunb]

2. I don't particularly care for GG, but, this

By stark contrast, no violence by the West against Muslims can possibly be “terrorism,” no matter how brutal, inhumane or indiscriminately civilian-killing. The U.S. can call its invasion of Baghdad “Shock and Awe” as a classic declaration of terrorism intent, or fly killer drones permanently over terrorized villages and cities, or engage in generation-lasting atrocities in Fallujah, or arm and fund Israeli and Saudi destruction of helpless civilian populations, and none of that, of course, can possibly be called “terrorism.” It just has the wrong perpetrators and the wrong victims.

about says it all.

[kath]

3. More on how "terrorism" is a meaningless propaganda term:

From another article

There’s a great paradox in the American political landscape: the word that is used most frequently to justify everything from invasions and bombings to torture, indefinite detention, and the sprawling Surveillance State — Terrorism — is also the most ill-defined and manipulated word. It has no fixed meaning, and thus applies to virtually anything the user wishes to demonize, while excluding the user’s own behavior and other acts one seeks to justify. All of this would be an interesting though largely academic, semantic matter if not for the central political significance with which this term is vested: both formally (in our law) and informally (in our political debates and rhetoric).

Snip

Of course, “the War on Terror” era has made this manipulation even more blatant and destructive — attacks by Muslims even when aimed at purely military targets (Fort Hood or even armies invading their own countries) are automatically deemed “Terrorism,” while attacks designed by the U.S., Israel and their allies with the clear purpose of terrorizing civilian populations into submission are not (nor is it Terrorism when a non-Muslim American flies his plane into the side of a government building or randomly shoots Pentagon police for political ends).

But the deceit inherent in that inconsistent application has been going on for several decades — from the Israeli attempt in the 1970s to universalize their local disputes under the rubric of that term, to America’s arming of the Nicaraguan contras, El Salvadoran death squads and even the Iranian regime in the 1980s, to the decades-long and ongoing games of who is (and is not) declared a “state sponsor of terror.” Interestingly, while many leading Senate Democrats and many establishment media outlets routinely and publicly accused the U.S. of being a “state sponsor of terrroism” in the 1980s (primarily by virtue of its actions in Central America), the very mention of such a possibility is now one of the greatest taboos.

http://www.salon.com/2010/03/14/terrorism_20/

[treestar]

4. For right wingers it means "any attack by a Muslim"

and justifies things like the Patriot Act and the Wars.

Whereas after McVeigh's terrorist act, rightly called so, there was no need for a war against the constitutionalists and libertarians that McVeigh belonged to.