This blogging week in Sweden, an incipient but promising debate about the semantics of terror soon morphed into a heated argument about motive, (un)civility and bias in the participants. While this is an interesting meta-debate all by itself, it did eclipse the original question somewhat, and I happen to think it important. Hence this ruminative Saturday morning afternoon post.

Historical context:
Earlier this week, SVT’s Faktum explored the possibility of redefining the term “terrorism” to include a slew of state and police actions, and also acts of violence against women here in Sweden. The pseudonymous Alicio wrote an exhaustive rebuttal that contained both substantive points and ad hominem ones (in the technical sense of the term). Ali Esbati, until recently head of the youth wing of the Left Party, responded in kind to Alicio. Then everybody had a say about who was more out of bounds.In debates about terrorism I think it would be helpful to first agree on the terminology, so that all parties know what precisely is being discussed. Too often, this kind of debate involves shifted semantics; the interlocutors argue past each other because they don’t first manage to agree on which words signify which concepts precisely.

I think this happens easily with the emotionally charged topic of terrorism, and I think that it happened specifically in the case of the blog fallout surrounding Faktum’s program. I also think Faktum itself was sloppy in fulfilling its journalistic mandate. No, not because it was biased (it was), but because it omitted interesting and important points that could have fleshed out the debate on its way to a perfectly acceptable biased conclusion. It would have been a much better program had Alicio’s critique been anticipatedOn public television, I don’t mind individual programs that show bias, as long as the channel overall is balanced. I do mind badly made programs.; his substantive points are excellent.

What I think is happening is that the word “terrorism” has gradually been invested with a vernacular meaning that is much broader than the original narrow definition. The vernacular meaning is normative and emotive — the word has practically become a synonym for “heinous act,” a silver medalist to genocide’s gold in an olympics of evil. The narrow definition of terrorism is drier and legalistic, and although there is wiggle room for emphasis, there are clear boundaries as to what it is notMy own version contains these tests for determining if an incident can be labeled terrorist:
 
1. Is the act one of violence or a credible threat of violence against individuals?
 
2. Is the aim to target civilians? (civilian victims as collateral damage in military targets, or as a result of a mistake in the fog of war, don’t count)
 
3. Is the purpose to coerce changes in public policy by instilling fear in the civilian population at large? (The Unabomber and Columbine don’t count. The anthrax attacks in 2001 do (and they were even successful in altering public policy))..

Terrorism then is a class of violence, a legal classification upon which a body of international law has been built. I think it is a pity that the term “terrorism” has also become a shorthand for any especially egregious act of violence, or even just all acts of violence in the name of causes one is opposed to. To conflate these meanings involves descriptive smudging, and in the process we lose the opportunity to pin down arguments in a debate. I don’t mean to say that the vernacular concepts that have come to be attached to the word are useless — I’m saying that we need to give them separate signifiers, so that we don’t run the risk of arguing past each other.

If I understand Faktum correctly, what they are trying to say is that this smudging is encouraged by “the powers that be” in order to whip up in the public the kind of hysteria that excuses all manner of heavy-handed state actions. My problem with their report, however, is that they haven’t chosen a particularly helpful method of making their point, because all they do is “smudge back.” I don’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of clever underhand agitprop, or a turning of the weapons of the mighty back against them, but the tactic of relabeling as terrorism everything that breaches a certain level of moral outrage does not strike me as an honest attempt at resolving this semantic mess. Rather, it looks to me like they’re wallowing in it.

A case in point: Faktum could have (should have?) homed in on a few specific incidents of violence in the Palestinian Territories and dissected them. Here is an example I prepared earlier 🙂 Three blog posts from July 2002, reactions to an Israeli missile strike on an apartment building in Gaza that killed Hamas commander Salah Shehada but also 14 civilians. I’ll reproduce the most relevant bits here:

Today’s Ha’aretz editorial calls the Gaza strike an act of state-sponsored terrorism. I don’t agree, but only because I like to quibble semantically about the proper use of the term “terrorism” — the word should be used to describe acts that deliberately aim to inspire terror in a civilian population. […]

What Sharon is guilty of is pursuing a military objective with wanton disregard for civilian life. His mindset is the same mindset that allowed Hiroshima and Dresden. […]

The moral difference between terrorism and what Sharon ordered is small, though. If you know with certainty your actions will cause civilian casualties way out of proportion with any military or political objective, then intent is irrelevant. If you order a missile strike on a city block, civilian casualties are not a mistake.

[…] If Sharon had known that Salah Shehada was hiding out in a city block full of Israelis, would he have made the same decision? In other words, is a Palestinian 3-year old’s life worth less than an Israeli 3-year old’s? To Sharon, I have no doubt it is, even if he is not fully capable of articulating this to himself.

Rereading this now, I’m veering more towards Ha’aretz’s assessment: One effect of the strike was to signal to Palestinian civilians that their safety does not figure in collateral calculations. To the extent that Sharon intended this to be a message to Palestinians as a motivation to alter their stance towards Hamas, it satisfies my definition of terrorism. Still, killing civilians was not the primary aim here. The missile attack would not have happened had Salah Shehada not been in the apartment building. It is a case of Israel skirting the border between legitimate defense and state terrorism, and in this case stepping across the line.

But me changing my opinion here is not such a big deal. The immorality of the strike in my mind isn’t altered by this legal reclassification. Nor does it change my conviction that a suicide bomber blowing herself up on a Jerusalem bus is a much starker case of terrorism, and also more contemptible — there is the complete absence of a military objective, for example. It is clear to me that the legality of an act and the morality of an act need to be considered separately when judging it in its totality, because while there are infinite gradations of (im)morality, there are only a few for illegality, so there cannot be a one-to-one correspondence.

The gray zone between what is terrorism and what is not is a place of nuance that all such debates should visit. Faktum fails to explore it.

Elsewhere in the program, the semantic smudging takes a turn for the ridiculous. Guantanamo is terrorism? It involves torture and illegal detention, but not terrorism, obviously. Violence against women is terrorism? It is illegal and it is immoral, but is it perpetrated by groups who want to change public policy? No. The invasion of Iraq is terrorism? Regardless of its legality or otherwise, it was a good old-fashioned war with military targets; it’s not automatically terrorism if you think it illegal.

What about resistance movements to military invasions? Faktum is correct in saying that invading powers are often quick to label such movements terrorist, even if the resistance only targets the military. This does not mean that resistance movements can never be terrorist, however. In Iraq, for example, the Baathist resistance has now blatantly adopted terrorist tactics against civilians, especially Iraqis.

In a nutshell, then, here is Faktum’s faulty methodology, made possible by semantic sloppiness: First, an appeal to the vernacular definition of terrorism (“Guantanamo is an outrage, hence terrorism”). Then, the claim of a legal equivalence with other acts of violence that do pass the legalistic test for terrorism (“Both guantanamo and suicide bombings are terrorism.”). Finally, the positing of a moral equivalence for these acts based on the shared terrorism label. (“Guantanamo shows that the US is no better than Hamas.”The logician in me compels me to point out that while it is still possible for the conclusion “the US is no better than Hamas” to be correct, it is certainly not because of this argument.)

Or did I miss something?