Editor's Note

Terrorism involves a war of images as well as of lethal weapons. The word “terrorism” is not value-neutral. It carries a built-in pejorative charge, such that to succeed in branding one’s opponent as terrorist is already to have won a significant victory in terms of propaganda advantage. Hence conflicting parties, be they state or non-state, devote considerable energies to the imagery of their dispute, to how the public sees the conflict. This issue of Global Dialogue explores both the image and reality of terrorism: on the one hand, the ways in which public perceptions of political violence are moulded, and on the other, the actual forms taken today by violence against the innocent to intimidate for political gain—perhaps the closest that can be achieved to a brief and unbiased definition of terrorism.

Our opening article, by Edward S. Herman, professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, challenges a near universal tendency in the debate on terrorism: the use of self-serving definitions to include foes but exclude allies as meriting the label. In a salutary corrective to this endemic practice, Herman describes the semantic sleights of hand by which the West has manipulated the term “terrorism” to legitimate its own “wholesale” political violence while condemning the comparatively minor “retail” violence of its opponents.

Herman’s conceptual ground-clearing is followed ABC News correspondent John K. Cooley’s panoramic survey of terrorism, old and new, east and west. Cooley sees the roots of much of today’s terrorism in the 1979–89 war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Once that war ended, battle-hardened Islamist veterans—many originally recruited and trained by the CIA—dispersed worldwide, using their military know-how to give violent expression to their militant anti-Western ideology at home and abroad.

The “Good Friday Agreement” of 1998 promised hope of a solution to one of the longest guerrilla conflicts in living memory—the IRA campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland. At the time of going to press, the Ulster peace process was in one of its periodic crises over decommissioning—the demand that paramilitaries, and in particular the IRA, put their weapons verifiably beyond use. Adrian Guelke of Queen’s University, Belfast, argues that there are reasons for believing the peace process will survive this and other difficulties. He sees the success of the Good Friday Agreement as lying in the ambiguity of its political significance, allowing all sides to believe the accord represents victory for them.

Modern information technology has added a new word to the lexicon of political violence: “cyberterrorism”. Computers and the Internet enable terrorists to communicate with each other, to disseminate their propaganda and to co-ordinate their attacks. As Dorothy E. Denning of Georgetown University points out, cyber-literate terrorists may also seek to sabotage financial, military and air-traffic control computer systems, with potentially devastating results.

The nightmare scenario in all present-day surveys of terrorism is that terrorists might obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Alex P. Schmid, Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations, weighs the likelihood of such an eventuality, reviewing the factors inhibiting and facilitating the use by terrorists of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Until recently, Americans felt secure against the threat of terrorism on US soil. Two events changed that: the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma in 1995. Brent L. Smith of the University of Alabama believes the attention paid to these two attacks has obscured the broader pattern of American terrorism. He looks at the evolution of political violence in the United States over the past thirty years, tracing a shift from terrorism perpetrated chiefly by left-wing groups to the right-wing and white supremacist violence that predominates today.

Although the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of native-born Americans, it prompted a counter-terrorism bill in 1996 that focused on international terrorism. Kamal Nawash, former legal counsel to the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee, argues that this bill, in its tolerance of secret evidence against non-US citizens (most of them Muslims) and its criminalisation of peaceful activity such as humanitarian fund-raising, has undermined the Constitution and threatened civil rights without producing any gains in the fight against terrorism.

The imagery of terrorism is the subject of our next contribution, by Beau Grosscup of California State University. He says that US policymakers and opinion formers have fostered among the American public the notion of “terrorism-at-a-distance”, according to which terrorism is essentially a product of the foreign “other”. Grosscup details the ways in which this imagery of “terrorism-at-a-distance” serves the interests of US power.

In the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, the US media rushed to point the finger, incorrectly, at Arabic or Islamic perpetrators. In the minds of many Americans, there is an almost reflex association between terrorism and Islam. Yahya R. Kamalipour of Purdue University Calumet, Indiana, describes the negative stereotyping of Muslims and Middle Easterners in the US media, both news and entertainment, that encourages such pernicious identification.

US policy with regard to Middle East terrorism is criticised by Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco. He says that the United States has tended to encourage such terrorism by its support for the state terrorism of its allies in the region, and by its own involvement in acts of terrorism against its perceived enemies. He recommends a number of policy changes whereby the United States can help minimise the injustice and repression that breed terrorism.

Most discussions of Middle East terrorism focus on political violence by Islamist and Palestinian groups. Terrorism by Zionist and Israeli extremists is often under-reported, even though it constitutes a serious threat to the prospects of Middle East peace. Editor and journalist Allan C. Brownfeld looks at the long and continuing history of Jewish/Zionist terrorism.

In its efforts to combat terrorism, the international community has increasingly adopted a law‑enforcement approach that regards terrorism purely as crime and ignores the social and political contexts in which political violence arises. Sanjib Baruah of Bard College, New York, maintains that this narrowly legalistic stance is severely limiting and that utilising the tools of conflict resolution would greatly improve the prospects of reducing terrorism.

Our final contribution, by Christopher L. Blakesley of Louisiana State University, is a historically wide-ranging examination of the various rationales that have been used to excuse terrorist and counter-terrorist violence against the innocent. Drawing in particular on the insights of Albert Camus, Blakesley concludes that such violence can never be justified.

Paul Theodoulou
Autumn 2000