Defining Terror

You can’t ignore it. Especially now during an election season. Terrorism is a part of the American dialogue. According to news anchors and politicians, the treat of terrorism, specifically “radical Islamic terrorism” is something that all Americans should be worried about. However, as Lisa Stampnitzky describes in Disciplining Terror, the way that we talk about terrorism has changed dramatically. Counterinsurgency, as defined before the 1970s, was rational, based in some exterior motivation, and the result of a desire to achieve some sociopolitical outcome. But now the world is faced with a new problem, “irrational and fundamentally immoral” terrorism (66). As John Mueller reports in Overblown, our reactions to terrorism are disproportional to the statistically calculated risk that it actually presents. This, in part, is a result of the perpetuation of the idea that “with terrorists, who knows what they’re thinking.” If, as rhetoric around the topic often suggests, terrorists want nothing more than to kill all Americans because a belief fundamental to a religion that has over a billion followers, “why are there so few Islamist terrorists?” (Kurzman 60). The inconsistency between the perceived threat of terrorism and the observed reality resemble a moral panic.

Remarkably, despite the overblown concern about “Islamic” terrorism, other acts that meet the criteria for terrorism are overlooked. In June of 2015, Dylann Roof entered a church in Charleston and killed nine people because they were black. This is not a speculation, it has been backed up by Roof’s claims, by a website he contributed to, and by his friends. Yet Roof was referred to as a “individual actor,” a “young boy,” and as “mentally ill.” As Americans, are we really committed to ending terrorism around the world at any cost, or do we like to selectively define crimes as terrorism in order to protect our own interests and condemn entire groups of people who could easily be defined as “others”?