This excerpt from Part I, chapter 2 of my book They’re So Smart cause we’re so stupid, on the way media handled the problem of using the word terrorism in response to 9-11. I put it up now in response to the claim of Ahlam Tammimi, a woman who deliberately targeted and killed children, that she shouldn’t be considered a terrorist:
“Why am I, Ahlam, considered to be a terrorist, when I am part of a movement for freedom and liberation?” she asked. “I am part of a resistance movement that strives for liberation.”
In so doing, she availed herself of a particular Western folly to clear her of the opprobrium she so richly deserves.
‘One Man’s Terrorist….’: Editorial Compliance with Jihadi Demands
Reuters Refuses to Use Terrorism Label for 9-11: One
Man’s Terrorist…
Among its many effects, 9-11 revealed an issue in journalism
that had remained hidden from most news consumers beforehand, but which became
a major topic of discussion and journalistic opinion in the subsequent years.
For some years already, Western news agencies had adopted an increasingly formal
rejection of using the word ‘terrorism/terrorist.’ It was, they argued, “too
emotive” a term, and although it was notoriously difficult to define,[1]
its use in describing a person or an act unfairly prejudiced the news consumer
against those so designated. After all, as the saying goes, “One man’s
terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
With this practice, news agencies aligned themselves with a
position staked out in academia by the new and advocacy-driven ‘field’ of Peace
and Conflict Studies,[2] on
the one hand, and by the Saïd-dominated “Middle East Studies Association,” on
the other. Notes Martin Kramer, serious critic of the post-colonial academy, on
the absence of ‘terrorism’ from the MESA statement on 9-11:
For years the academics’ response
to terrorism has been to act as amplifiers for the “grievances” behind it. For
the professors, terrorism was a kind of political protest —and since they
sympathized with its supposed motives, they expelled the word ‘terrorism’ from
their lexicon. This weekend’s conference demonstrates the neglect: With the
exception of a hastily announced special panel, nothing in the program deals
with terrorism.[3]
In other words, mainstream news media had become practitioners
of ‘peace journalism,’ lining up with the post-colonial, anti-American
paradigm. Given that making that choice had helped lead Israel to catastrophe,
it was a highly dubious direction in which to move.[4]
Few expressions better qualify as an astoundingly stupid statement,
not because there are no cases where one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom
fighter, not because it is in and of itself, absurd (just very dubious[5]),
but because it was applied to exactly the wrong situation and nevertheless gained
widespread acceptance. In applying this claim, a great deal hangs on what one
means by ‘freedom.’ The notion of independence for a people may not be as
common in the rest of the world as it is in the modern and post-modern West,
where it is almost considered a default position for revolts and resistance to
established rule. But in some cases, ‘resistance’ comes not from fighting for
independence and autonomy, but for dominion.
Anyone claiming, therefore, that an imperialist movement that
repeatedly attacks civilian populations marked for subjection should not be
called ‘terrorists,’ because they might be ‘freedom fighters,’ shows little
respect for either language or empirical reality. Here, the ‘enlightened’ Western
mind meets triumphalist religiosity, and cannot see it for what it is. The
Caliphate is not about freedom; it is literally about ‘submission’ – Dar al
Islam. And yet, when this line was used exactly where it did not apply,
people in the 21st century sagely nodded their heads: ‘We all know
that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.’
While at once flippant and meant to épater les bourgeois, the proverb
became increasingly adopted as a policy principle in journalism. As we have
seen, the first place it was systematically applied was in Western coverage of
the Middle East conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in the 1990s, the
Oslo years.[6] Then on
the morrow of 9-11, Americans discovered that their attackers might also be
freedom fighters. Reuters chief editor Stephen Jukes sent out an in-house memo
instructing those responsible for the news production not to use the terror
word to describe 9-11. If someone else used the word, one could quote the
person, but for its own journalists, Reuters deemed ‘terrorism’ an
inappropriate term:
We all know that one man’s terrorist
is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle
that we do not use the word terrorist… To be frank, it adds little to call the
attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.[7]
We all know? That one man’s terrorist is always
another man’s freedom fighter?
Jukes issued a FAQ in October of 2001, which elaborated the
argument behind the policy:
As part of a long-standing policy to
avoid the use of emotive words, we do not use terms like “terrorist” and “freedom
fighter” unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a
third party. We do not characterize the subjects of news stories, but instead
report their actions, identity and background so that readers can make their
own decisions based on the facts.[8]
For the first time, on a major scale, this principle that so
galled Israelis – they called it an inability to distinguish between arsonist
and fire-fighter – was applied in the United States. Not accidentally, the
first agency to formally insist on not using the ‘terrorist’ designations for what
the ‘freedom fighters’ called the “magnificent 19,” or their deeds on 9-11, was
European – Reuters, quickly followed by the BBC. Chief Deputy Editor Mark
Damazer explained:
However appalling and disgusting it
was, there will nevertheless be a constituency of your listeners who don’t
regard it as terrorism. Describing it as such could downgrade your status as an
impartial and independent broadcaster.[9]
In other words, out of deference to those of our viewers who
don’t think of the attacks on the US as terrorism, we will avoid using the term,
lest these folks (who apparently could not care less about impartial and
independent broadcasting), think badly of the BBC.
Among American journalists, for whom such “dispassion” would
alienate all but the most ‘universalist’ of their audiences, the practice aroused
indignation and mockery.[10]
But in the coming years, the Reuters’ position became the industry standard,
formally adopted by the top US papers: the Washington Post, the New York Times,
the Boston Globe. When home-grown Jihadis hit London on July 7, 2005, the BBC, the
Guardian, and Reuters all initially used the word terror to describe the
attacks, but quickly ‘recovered.’ The BBC issued a memo formally discouraging
the use of ‘terrorism’ to describe the attacks on the London subway by Muslims
born and raised in England, and quietly tried to change previous headlines so
as to hide their initial ‘error.’[11]
This may seem like an academic game of little serious import
beyond the hurt feelings of (in this case) Americans, who feel themselves the
object of a heinous attack and find ‘activist’ and ‘militant’ far too bland to
describe the perpetrators. When Jukes notes frankly that “it adds little to
call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack,” he appeals to
the obvious – calling 9-11 a terror attack was redundant; everyone knew
it was. But, again as the Israelis had already complained, this terminological
policy brought with it more problematic practices, including humanizing the terrorists,
and framing their deeds as resistance against oppression and a struggle for
freedom. Nonetheless, the doctrine of not using ‘terrorist’ became so deeply
engrained among some journalists that some even cleaned up the language of
independent sources as well.[12]
Among the many things this high-minded journalistic
discourse about not using terrorism obscured (I think, intentionally) was how
ferociously the terrorists themselves, and especially their
defenders/apologists, objected to the term ‘terrorists.’ Indeed, they
apparently felt so strongly about their image, that they were willing to kill
journalists who called them terrorists.[13]
From the perspective of Da’ī Caliphaters, the problem was not the crime
(terrorism), but how it gave Jihadis a bad image that reflected badly on their ‘moderate,
peaceful’ Islam.
And, of course, the onēidophobe finds any criticism
insulting, as offenses that demand violent retaliation. ‘Call my Jihadi allies ‘terrorists,’
and I’ll savage you, even if you’re the Foreign Minister of France.’[14] ‘Call
our religion violent and we’ll riot and kill both infidels and Muslims in
protest.’[15] Playing
the ‘good’ cops to the jihadi bad cops, this angry Muslim street insisted that
the terrorist label not be applied to their co-religionists. It mattered not at
all that the accusation of terrorism was true – in a form rarely this
unalloyed. The purpose was to remove a deep moral stain (in the eyes of the targeted
enemy), to forbid them to express effective disapproval of Muslim terrorists.
The media complied, using the term ‘emotive’ as a neutral term to submit to the
Jihadi demand: do not depict of Jihadi acts as terrorism. Muslim terrorist was
not correct language.
Thus, behind the Western language of peace and understanding
lay a different set of reasons for avoiding the term ‘terrorism,’ especially
when it came to Muslim attacks on infidel civilians: the fear of retaliation.
Behind the principled neutral language and the rather problematic insistence on
‘leveling the playing field’ lurks something more disturbing and more shameful
for journalists to admit: fear and intimidation. “We don’t want to
jeopardize the safety of our staff,” the head of Reuters explains to the
inquiring journalist. “Our people are on the front lines, in Gaza, the West
Bank and Afghanistan [NB: all Muslim territories]. The minute we seem to be
siding with one side or another [sic], they’re in danger.” Actually, they are only
in danger if they seem to be siding with the wrong side.
In other words, if we call Jihadis who attack civilians ‘terrorists,’
our journalists are in danger from terrorists who, closely following how we
cover their behavior, will attack us for violating their demands for how we
report about them. Apparently – who knew? – Jihadis care what the West thinks
of them…[16] So much
so, they are ready to use violence against journalists to get the coverage they
want. So, what motivated this policy on ‘terrorism’: principles or
intimidation? And what were the cognitive consequences of that policy? Over the
subsequent years, a distinct pattern emerged: more and more news editors
adopted the Reuters’ principles and rationale for not using the term ‘terrorism’
to refer to Jihadis, even as the evidence for intimidation became ever more
abundant.
[1] There is an immense literature on defining terrorism.
I will use it to designate the deliberate targeting of civilians in order to
terrify a population into a state of submission. The operative term here, is
the targeting of civilians as primary targets, from which the term derives its
moral opprobrium.
[2] See below, chap on GPL.
[3] Martin Kramer, “Terrorism? What Terrorism,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2001 (with rejoinder by Saïd). See also his Ivory Towers on Sand.
[4] See below, III, 1.
[5] It’s a false dichotomy on the one hand: just because
one is fighting for freedom doesn’t mean one can’t also be a terrorist (i.e.
deliberately attack civilians); and on the other hand, it is a false identity:
terrorists rarely make good freedom fighters (e.g. the Bolsheviks). See Anna
Geifman, “When Terrorists become State Leaders,” Death Orders, pp.
122-38. Polemicists who argue the “one man’s terrorist…” often cite Menachem
Begin as an example of a terrorist who made the transition. He is actually the
exception that proves the (opposite) rule: ‘terrorists may pretend to be
freedom fighters, but they rarely bring freedom.’
[6] See above, I, 1.
[7] A disgruntled Reuters’’ employee who received it,
forwarded it to the Washington Post’s columnist Howard Kurtz, who then
published details of both the memo and a subsequent conversation with Jukes:
Howard Kurtz, “The
T Word,” Washington Post, September 24, 2001; link broken.
For a general discussion of the problem, see Susan Moeller, Packaging
Terrorism: Coopting the News for Politics and Profit, chap. 1.
[8] Updated, Stephen Jukes, October 2000. No longer
online. For the formal statement of policy see Reuters
Handbook of Journalism.
[9] Matt Wells, “[BBC]
World Service will not call US attacks terrorism,” Guardian,
November 15, 2001.
[10] Michael Kinsley, “Defining
Terrorism,” Washington Post, October 5, 2001.
[11] Tom Gross, “The BBC
Discovers ‘Terrorism,’ Briefly,” Jerusalem Post, July
12, 2005; Meryl Yourish, “The
T-Word,” Yourish.com, July 9, 2005. Note
this was done in the World Service, international segment, not domestic
coverage where local indignation might grow problematic.
[12] Dan Pipes, “Calling
a Terrorist a Terrorist,” Blog, April 27, 2004; Honest
Reporting, “Calling Terrorism by its Name,” ***. For an example of a rogue
editor at the Minneapolis Star “cleaning up” a NYT story, see below, II, 3, n.
72.
[13] Chafets, Double Vision, pp. 127-54.
[14] “During an official trip to Israel, Lionel Jospin
[then Foreign Minister]
dared to use the word “terrorist” to describe the
actions of Hizbullah. He set off a storm. At the Palestinian University of Bir
Zeit, his car was nearly turned over. He was spit on and stoned. He was hit in
the head by a stone and had to flee to the sound of jeering. Paul Giniewski, “Jews of
France Tormented by ‘Intifada of the Suburbs’,” and Pierre Haski, “Quand
Lionel Jospin qualifiait le Hezbollah de « terroriste »,” Le
Nouvel Obs, May 23, 2013.
[15] On the riots provoked by the pope’s Regensburg
speech, see I, 4.
[16] Note that Bin Laden complained that Muslims like him
are called terrorists by the worst terrorists
(US) who invite other terrorists (Gerry Adam) to the White House: “Transcript of
Osama Bin Ladin Interview by Peter Arnett,” CNN, March
1997.
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