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by Peter A. Belmont / 2009-01-25
© 2009 Peter Belmont
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When one reads that “Israel (or the US) regards * * * as a terrorist organization” it means, as a rule, that Israel (or the US) has decided to fight that entity as an implacable enemy, usually without possibility of negotiation. The slogan is an excuse for war crimes.
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We are always hearing that Israel (or the US) regards Hamas (or Al Qaida or Hezbollah) as a “terrorist organization”. Ever wonder where the slogan—terrorist organization comes from and what it means?
Generally, “terrorism” is defined, roughly, as the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature.
It is often supposed that the US and Israel are not satisfied with this definition and that they add to it the qualification that the actor must be a non-state. I don’t know about Israel, and I don’t know how often “terrorism” is defined in the US Code or elsewhere by the US, but 18 USC § 2331 [1]defines terrorism in the passive voice and does not require that actor to be a non-state entity. So, contrary to my own long-time belief, the US and Israel can be terrorists according to at least one US definition of terrorism.[2]
Nevertheless, this general—if mistaken—understanding allows the US and Israel to avoid being described as “terrorists” when they fight wars such as Israel’s recent smashing of Gaza (January 2009).
Well, why do Israel and the US use the T-word?
The answer seems to be that the emotional revulsion that people within the US and Israel feel for the term (and the reality) of terrorism (when used against themselves) is so strong [3] that the mere use of the term persuades the populace that the government behaves properly when it takes the most extreme steps in “combating terrorism”. Steps that independent observers sometimes characterize as “war-crimes.” Steps that independent observers sometimes characterize as “terrorism.”
In fact, when nations go as far as Israel has gone to ignore international law, to assert, in effect, that “I am the law” or “Damn the torpedoes law, full speed ahead”, questions of law disappear, and it becomes clear that the T-word is not used for its legal signification but, rather, as an emotional trick. Just as Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and Franco were happy to use force however it pleased them to do so, without regard for law, so too Israel and, it often seems, the US.
But people have feelings of propriety and know that destroying cities and bombing hospitals and ambulances and cutting off food supplies and preventing people from obtaining medicines and medical care and dropping cluster-bombs on civilian populations and using white phosphorus bombs or shells against civilian targets, as Israel has done in Gaza, is generally improper and unpalatable, and therefore governments need a slogan or bumper-sticker or code-word to use when they wish to get their own public to “go along” when they wish to grant themselves the “right” to commit such war-crimes against other people.
And ”terrorism” is that slogan.
What’s especially convenient about the T-word is that when—after you have pulverized them and sent them back toward the stone-age—they retaliate, you can usually use the T-word again to make your subsequent escalations “OK” with your own public.
(If there was ever a time when Al Qaida in Afghanistan was fighting solely against the US army and the government (and army) of Afghanistan, then, at such time, Al Qaida was not acting as “terrorists” because they were not attacking civilians. Or attacking for terroristic purposes.)
Thus, when Israel had established and maintained a near-total siege (blockade) on Gaza for 6 months, preventing food and medicine and pretty much everything else from entering Gaza, and so reducing the entire population of 1-1/2 million people to near-starvation[4], a procedure which clearly violates the prohibition on “collective punishments” of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and also assassinating several Hamas leaders[5]—when Hamas finally broke down and fought back by shooting a volley of rockets into Israel, Israel cried out, “Oh dear, a terrorist response, just what we wanted!” and proceeded to move onward from their siege to an all-out military attack (by the fourth most powerful military in the world against a groups armed with small-arms and a few home-made rocket launchers). This brilliant military exercise, some said, “like shooting fish in a barrel”, would never have been justified against a “democratic” or “European” enemy but was quite acceptable to the Israeli public due to the timely use of the T-word.[6]
(The US’s captive media[7]—devoted to propagating the most extreme pro-Israeli propaganda lines—also used the T-word, failed to recall to American audiences Israel’s 6-months siege and its assassinations which set the whole thing off, and generally behaved as willing handmaidens to Israeli imperialism, even as they had to US imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That’s about all I have to say about “terrorism” except to say that neither Hamas’s rockets against Israeli towns (which, if not aimed at military or government targets, are certainly acts of terrorism), nor Israel’s responses which are acts of “terrorism”, are of the slightest use in their goal “as” terrorism—changing the hearts and minds of the populace which was attacked.[8] Everyone attacked just gets more determined and runs off to ratchet-up the violence.
What almost never happens is that the populace thinks a bit about how their own group (Hamas) or nation (US, Israel) may have been at fault, may have brought the terrorist attack upon the populace. [9] This is a hard thing to think about—as governments well know, and depend on—because people want to trust their governments to protect them and hesitate to picture their governments as the perpetrator who brought rockets (or airplanes) down on their heads.
We should stop hesitating (to picture our governments as perpetrators) and start thinking.
It would help if we would simply stop (when the T-word has been uttered) to consider that the people of whom it is used are human beings, like us, with hopes and dreams and (so we would all like to suppose) human rights.
If they are opposing us, perhaps it is because of something we (that is, our governments) have done. If we (i.e., our government or group) stops doing whatever is harmful to them, perhaps they will stop opposing us. If whatever we have been doing to them was illegal, perhaps we should stop doing it whether or not it stops them from opposing us, just as if (international) law were the support for international peace that it was intended to be.
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[1] Sec. 2331. Definitions
As used in this chapter -
(1) the term “international terrorism” means activities that -
(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;
(2) the term “national of the United States” has the meaning given such term in section 101(a)(22) of the Immigration and Nationality Act;
(3) the term “person” means any individual or entity capable of holding a legal or beneficial interest in property;
(4) the term “act of war” means any act occurring in the course of -
(A) declared war;
(B) armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or
(C) armed conflict between military forces of any origin; and
(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that -
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.
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[2] This mistake of mine is embarrassing because I am a lawyer and I should have looked it up long ago. Perhaps I had seen another definition?
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[3] The revulsion is usually weaker when their own government is the terrorist, and recall that Israel has had two terrorist prime ministers: Begin and Shamir, and one more who might as well be one, Sharon)
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[4] But probably not reducing Hamas members or leaders, the nominal targets of the exercise, to starvation
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[5] Without arrest, charge, or regular trial as required by the Fourth Geneva Convention
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[6] The curious idea that a democracy cannot commit war-crimes or commit terrorism is another of those comforting illusions with which US and Israel persuade their populaces that their superiority of fire-power is actually moral (and legal) superiority.
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[7] We don’t need state censorship or a state-owned media in the US—our corporate media, attuned like our Congress to big money and to subservience to AIPAC and the rest of The Lobby, do this without coercion from government.
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[8] Israel was clearly hoping that its siege and attack on Gaza would make the people of Gaza abandon Hamas. The siege and attack were against the populace and were therefore terrorism.
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[9] Governments use this psychological dependency (“my government is here to defend me, so any provocation by my government which brings on a terrorist attack is invisible or is not seen as a provocation but, rather, as a reasonable response to the other’s provocation”) all the time. Israel has used it repeatedly.
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