Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

As an English teacher, I am fascinated by the equivocal usage of ambiguous terms. In a current affairs class I teach, students noticed the different ways the word “terrorist” has been used. We discovered a variety of uses in events surrounding the war in Palestine / Israel, as well as in the murder case of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, which caused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to accuse the Indian government of conducting an extra-judicial killing on Canadian soil. As their English teacher, I had to confront the question, “What do people mean when they call someone a terrorist?”

Earlier today, a Tunisian man was killed in connection to the shooting deaths of two Swedish people, seriously injuring a third, in Brussels, Belgium. According to BBC news, “[Belgian] Prime Minister Alexander De Croo called the shooting “a harrowing act of terrorism” in a press conference and prosecutors said the victims were probably targeted because they were Swedish.” The journalist reported the Belgian Prime Minister calling the act ‘terrorism’, but the journalist never did. Why? Would it not be a descriptive, and a journalistic responsibility, for the reporter to call the act “terrorist?”

This issue has emerged in the last week with particular pressures on journalists to describe particular groups and persons as “terrorists.” Such has been the case in Canada and the UK. However, we – and not only journalists – should all be careful of applying “terrorist” to situations and to groups as if it described a factual reality. By certain definitions we can label acts as terrorist. For example, the Oxford dictionary describes terrorism as: “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” In this definition, the aims of the so-called terrorist must be known. If the aim of the act of unlawful violence or intimidation is revenge, for example, then it isn’t terrorism. Of course, the previous definition of terrorism is not the only one. The FBI, different dictionaries, the US Department of Homeland Security, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and countless other organizations all have their own definitions of terrorism – but what is key to all of them is the intention of the perpetrator of a so-called criminal or terrorist act. A journalist surely is not typically privy to the intention of the perpetrator. In both the cases of the BBC in the UK and of the CBC in Canada, editorial policy was to not use “terrorist” to describe any person; instead it was to be used to describe acts or to be attributed to people who actually spoke or wrote the term. They said it both unfairly biased the reader and shirked its journalistic responsibility to NOT take sides. I agree with that editorial decision.

However, how “terrorist” is used is what I am primarily interested in, and not merely the dictionary definitions. I am a language pragmatist. Being a language pragmatist helps me, for example, to understand how my parents would use the term “gay” to mean something entirely different than the way it is now used. Dictionary definitions do not help us account for this change.  

The problem with the use of “terrorist” in naming perpetrators or organizations, we discovered, is that the person or group doing the naming almost always does it, pragmatically, in preparation for the next step, which is to justify treating the person or group that receives the name “terrorist” outside of legal parameters. As far as we could tell, those uses serve one of two senses (and sometimes both): either 1) to justify a moral judgment (“terrorists are bad guys”) or 2) to justify treating the person or group extra-judicially (“terrorists should be wiped out”). We noticed that those who use it primarily in sense 2 have significant means of violence at their disposal, such as state actors or militant groups. In one such example, according to CNN, “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed the “barbaric terrorists in Gaza” for “attacking” the [Al Ahli Hospital] on Tuesday.” Calling someone a terrorist is distinctly different than calling them a criminal. To call someone a terrorist rather than a criminal has been used to treat the person outside the law. It is a reason to use any methods to deal with them – and primarily extra-judicial ones. If we say that someone is a criminal, it is a commitment to treat them according to the law.

Al Ahli Baptist Hospital

It would seem that the attack on the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital today could be safely classified as a terrorist attack, and those that did it, “terrorists.” It killed, by early counts, at least 500 patients, doctors and nurses. However, surprisingly, the Arab Ambassadors, speaking in a united fashion through Palestinian Ambassador Mr. Riyad Mansour at the UN, did not resort to calling the perpetrators “terrorists.” Instead, he called them “criminals” and advocated that they “face justice” and be “held accountable according to the severity of their crime.” He went on to condemn the crime without failing to communicate their joint outrage.

I was incredibly moved by his statement. Moreover, he spoke with wisdom in the use of his words. He did not resort to “barbaric terrorists”; instead, he spoke of “criminals.” Why is this significant? It applies the use of law to bring justice. It does not open the door to extra-judicial measures and measurements, whether they be moral judgments or war measures.

We are beginning to see what the journalists know. When we describe something as terrorist, we are, in fact, expressing an opinion and exercising one kind of judgment, at the expense of another. For a long time, judgment has been understood in 2 senses: to understand (discernment), and to praise/blame (condemnation). The BBC and the CBC have known this distinction all-too-well. They know that when we first condemn and then try to understand, we fall victim to at least two significant problems. First, we almost always make the situation worse when we condemn before we understand. Second, we almost always fail to really understand.

Interestingly, in both the UK and in Canada, as the linked news articles show, it is conservative politicians who advocate using “terrorism” descriptively without acknowledging its pragmatic pejorative senses that are its most common uses. It is like conservative state actors are asking our national news sources to condemn before coming to understand an incredibly complex situation with not only millions of Palestinian and thousands of Israeli lives at stake, but also with hundreds of nationals from both the UK and Canada who are mere civilians. In both the UK and Canadian cases, the pressure to condemn before understanding is underscored by the pressure to defund the BBC and the CBC, both of which are publicly funded. In other words, it is an attempt to pull on the moral heartstrings and blind loyalty of the citizenry for economic reasons – a kind of manipulation that might be acceptable on reality TV, but has no place in matters of life or death.

Condemning before understanding, one might say colloquially, is quite barbaric. It often leads to unrestrained violence directed without discretion of whether the victims are combatants or civilians.

As an English teacher, I had to caution my class not to bandy about the word “terrorist” too much. And now, too, I caution you the reader to avoid using it too often. One often labels those with whom one has conflicting interests or those we don’t like as “terrorists” for no other reason than “they are in the way.” The “terrorist” label is often an unwarranted shortcut to the moral high road – a road Israel and the United States have taken too often.

It was that way in the Iraq Wars; it was that way in the wars in Israel in 1994, in the first and second intifadas, and it certainly is that way now. My hunch is that such use of the term terrorism is said in the context of the term “human rights,” and such a rhetorical game hides the fact that no one has any exclusive shortcut to the moral high road (if there is such high moral road) – as much as Western conservatives would have us believe otherwise.

The real defence against those peddlers of morally laden language, is to refuse to use such terms as “the right to defend itself” and “barbaric terrorists.” I do not make this recommendation only for state and international actors, but to all of us. We need to refuse to use the rhetoric of the moral high road and terrorism as a way of smuggling in economic (trade and tourism) and resource-driven (solar or oil energy, or nuclear capabilities) agendas as in the Abraham Accords, all under the name of “security” or “stability”. Condemning before understanding is a custom that cannot fairly be attributed to only conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. Instead, it is an entirely uncivilized part of who we are as human beings and it rears its ugly head each and every time we fail to really think for ourselves.  

Instead, we should look to models like Mr. Riyad Mansour and all the Arab Ambassadors to the U.N., and we should learn again to describe what we see (a heinous crime), ask for what we want (an immediate ceasefire), and advocate for solutions within the law (to face justice by being held to full account by the law).

 Wouldn’t that be something?!