> (A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12, 1998)
> In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described
> as "TERRORIST." Then new things happened.
> By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with
> the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the
> terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be
> described, by 1944-45, as "freedom fighters." At least two Israeli Prime
> Ministers, including Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the
> books and posters with their pictures, saying "Terrorists, Reward This
> Much." The highest reward I have noted so far was 100,000 British pounds
> on the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist.
> Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation
Organization,
> occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has
> been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism,
> William Safire of the New York Times, as the "Chief of Terrorism." That's
> Yasir Arafat.
> Now, on September 29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of
> Yasir Arafat to the right of President Bill Clinton. To his left is
> Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Clinton is looking towards
> Arafat and Arafat is looking literally like a meek mouse. Just a few years
> earlier he used to appear with this very menacing look around him, with a
> gun appearing menacing from his belt. You remember those pictures, and you
> remember the next one.
> In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. These
> bearded men I was writing about in those days in The New Yorker, actually
> did. They were very ferocious-looking bearded men with turbans looking
> like they came from another century. President Reagan received them in the
> White House. After receiving them he spoke to the press. He pointed
> towards them, I'm sure some of you will recall that moment, and said,
> "These are the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers". These were
> the Afghan Mujahiddin. They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the
> Evil Empire. They were the moral equivalent of our founding fathers!
> In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes from
> the American navy based in the Indian Ocean to kill Osama Bin Laden and
> his men in the camps in Afghanistan. I do not wish to embarrass you with
> the reminder that Mr. Bin Laden, whom fifteen American missiles were fired
> to hit in Afghanistan, was only a few years ago the moral equivalent of
> George Washington and Thomas Jefferson! He got angry over the fact that he
> has been demoted from 'Moral Equivalent' of your 'Founding Fathers'. So he
> is taking out his anger in different ways. I'll come back to that subject
> more seriously in a moment.
> You see, why I have recalled all these stories is to point out to you that
> the matter of terrorism is rather complicated. Terrorists change. The
> terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday
> becomes the terrorist of today. This is a serious matter of the constantly
> changing world of images in which we have to keep our heads straight to
> know what is terrorism and what is not. But more importantly, to know what
> causes it, and how to stop it.
> The next point about our terrorism is that posture of inconsistency
> necessarily evades definition. If you are not going to be consistent,
> you're not going to define. I have examined at least twenty official
> documents on terrorism. Not one defines the word. All of them explain it,
> express it emotively, polemically, to arouse our emotions rather than
> exercise our intelligence. I give you only one example, which is
> representative. October 25, 1984. George Shultz, then Secretary of State
> of the U.S., is speaking at the New York Park Avenue Synagogue. It's a
> long speech on terrorism. In the State Department Bulletin of seven
> single-spaced pages, there is not a single definition of terrorism. What
> we get is the following:
> Definition number one: "Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call
> terrorism."
> Definition number two is even more brilliant: "Terrorism is a form of
> political violence." Aren't you surprised? It is a form of political
> violence, says George Shultz, Secretary of State of the U.S.
> Number three: "Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization."
> Number four: "Terrorism is a menace to Western moral values."
> Did you notice, does it tell you anything other than arouse your
emotions?
> This is typical. They don't define terrorism because definitions involve a
> commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of
> consistency. That's the second characteristic of the official literature on terrorism.
> The third characteristic is that the absence of definition does not
> prevent officials from being globalistic. We may not define terrorism, but
> it is a menace to the moral values of Western civilization. It is a menace
> also to mankind. It's a menace to good order. Therefore, you must stamp it
> out worldwide. Our reach has to be global. You need a global reach to kill
> it. Anti-terrorist policies therefore have to be global. Same speech of
> George Shultz: "There is no question about our ability to use force where
> and when it is needed to counter terrorism." There is no geographical
> limit. On a single day the missiles hit Afghanistan and Sudan. Those two
> countries are 2,300 miles apart, and they were hit by missiles belonging
> to a country roughly 8,000 miles away. Reach is global.
> A fourth characteristic: claims of power are not only globalist they are
> also omniscient. We know where they are; therefore we know where to hit.
> We have the means to know. We have the instruments of knowledge. We are
> omniscient. Shultz: "We know the difference between terrorists and freedom
> fighters, and as we look around, we have no trouble telling one from the other."
> Only Osama Bin Laden doesn't know that he was an ally one day and an enemy
> another. That's very confusing for Osama Bin Laden. I'll come back to his
> story towards the end. It's a real story.
> Five. The official approach eschews causation. You don't look at causes of
> anybody becoming terrorist. Cause? What cause? They ask us to be looking, to be sympathetic to these people.
> Another example. The New York Times, December 18, 1985, reported that the
> foreign minister of Yugoslavia, you remember the days when there was a
> Yugoslavia, requested the Secretary of State of the U.S. to consider the
> causes of Palestinian terrorism. The Secretary of State, George Shultz,
> and I am quoting from the New York Times, "went a bit red in the face. He
> pounded the table and told the visiting foreign minister, there is no
> connection with any cause. Period." Why look for causes?
> Number six. The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is
> selective. We are to feel the terror of those groups, which are officially
> disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of those groups of whom
> officials do approve. Hence, President Reagan, "I am a contra." He
> actually said that. We know the contras of Nicaragua were anything, by any
> definition, but terrorists. The media, to move away from the officials, heed the dominant view of terrorism.
> The dominant approach also excludes from consideration, more importantly
> to me, the terror of friendly governments. To that question I will return
> because it excused among others the terror of Pinochet (who killed one of
> my closest friends) and Orlando Letelier; and it excused the terror of Zia
> ul-Haq, who killed many of my friends in Pakistan. All I want to tell you
> is that according to my ignorant calculations, the ratio of people killed
> by the state terror of Zia ul-Haq, Pinochet, Argentinian, Brazilian,
> Indonesian type, versus the killing of the PLO and other terrorist types
> is literally, conservatively, one to one hundred thousand. That's the ratio.
> History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power and not
> to weakness. Therefore, visibility has been accorded historically to
> dominant groups. In our time, the time that began with this day, Columbus Day.
> The time that begins with Columbus Day is a time of extraordinary
> unrecorded holocausts. Great civilizations have been wiped out. The Mayas,
> the Incas, the Aztecs, the American Indians, the Canadian Indians were all
> wiped out. Their voices have not been heard, even to this day fully. Now
> they are beginning to be heard, but not fully. They are heard, yes, but
> only when the dominant power suffers, only when resistance has a semblance
> of costing, of exacting a price. When a Custer is killed or when a Gordon
> is besieged. That's when you know that they were Indians fighting, Arabs fighting and dying.
> My last point of this section - U.S. policy in the Cold War period has
> sponsored terrorist regimes one after another. Somoza, Batista, all kinds
> of tyrants have been America's friends. You know that. There was a reason
> for that. I or you are not guilty. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan, mujahiddin. El Salvador, etc.
> Now the second side. You've suffered enough. So suffer more.
> There ain't much good on the other side either. You shouldn't imagine that
> I have come to praise the other side. But keep the balance in mind. Keep
> the imbalance in mind and first ask ourselves, What is terrorism?
> Our first job should be to define the damn thing, name it, give it a
> description of some kind, other than "moral equivalent of founding
> fathers" or "a moral outrage to Western civilization". I will stay with
> you with Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: "Terror is an intense,
> overpowering fear." He uses terrorizing, terrorism, "the use of
> terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government." This simple
> definition has one great virtue, that of fairness. It's fair. It focuses
> on the use of coercive violence, violence that is used illegally,
> extra-constitutionally, to coerce. And this definition is correct because
> it treats terror for what it is, whether the government or private people commit it.
> Have you noticed something? Motivation is left out of it. We're not
> talking about whether the cause is just or unjust. We're talking about
> consensus, consent, absence of consent, legality, absence of legality,
> constitutionality, absence of constitutionality. Why do we keep motives
> out? Because motives differ. Motives differ and make no difference.
> I have identified in my work five types of terrorism.
> First, state terrorism. Second, religious terrorism; terrorism inspired by
> religion, Catholics killing Protestants, Sunnis killing Shiites, Shiites
> killing Sunnis, God, religion, sacred terror, you can call it if you wish.
> State, church. Crime. Mafia. All kinds of crimes commit terror. There is
> pathology. You're pathological. You're sick. You want the attention of the
> whole world. You've got to kill a president. You will. You terrorize. You
> hold up a bus. Fifth, there is political terror of the private group; be
> they Indian, Vietnamese, Algerian, Palestinian, Baader-Meinhof, the Red
> Brigade. Political terror of the private group. Oppositional terror.
> Keep these five in mind. Keep in mind one more thing. Sometimes these five
> can converge on each other. You start with protest terror. You go crazy.
> You become pathological. You continue. They converge. State terror can
> take the form of private terror. For example, we're all familiar with the
> death squads in Latin America or in Pakistan. Government has employed
> private people to kill its opponents. It's not quite official. It's
> privatized. Convergence. Or the political terrorist who goes crazy and
> becomes pathological. Or the criminal who joins politics. In Afghanistan,
> in Central America, the CIA employed in its covert operations drug
> pushers. Drugs and guns often go together. Smuggling of all things often go together.
> Of the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the least important
> in terms of cost to human lives and human property [Political Terror of
> those who want to be heard]. The highest cost is state terror. The second
> highest cost is religious terror, although in the twentieth century
> religious terror has, relatively speaking, declined. If you are looking
> historically, massive costs. The next highest cost is crime. Next highest,
> pathology. A Rand Corporation study by Brian Jenkins, for a ten-year
> period up to 1988, showed 50% of terror was committed without any
> political cause at all. No politics. Simply crime and pathology.
> So the focus is on only one, the political terrorist, the PLO, the Bin
> Laden, whoever you want to take. Why do they do it? What makes the terrorist tick?
> I would like to knock them out quickly to you. First, the need to be
> heard. Imagine, we are dealing with a minority group, the political,
> private terrorist. First, the need to be heard. Normally, and there are
> exceptions, there is an effort to be heard, to get your grievances heard
> by people. They're not hearing it. A minority acts. The majority applauds.
> The Palestinians, for example, the superterrorists of our time, were
> dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to 1968 they went to every court in the
> world. They knocked at every door in the world. They were told that they
> became dispossessed because some radio told them to go away - an Arab
> radio, which was a lie. Nobody was listening to the truth. Finally, they
> invented a new form of terror, literally their invention: the airplane
> hijacking. Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled the world up by its ears.
> They dragged us out and said, Listen, Listen. We listened. We still
> haven't done them justice, but at least we all know. Even the Israelis
> acknowledge. Remember Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, saying in
> 1970, 'There are no Palestinians.' They do not exist. They damn well exist
> now. We are cheating them at Oslo. At least there are some people to cheat
> now. We can't just push them out. The need to be heard is essential. One motivation there.
> Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to strike out. You are
> angry. You are feeling helpless. You want retribution. You want to wreak
> retributive justice. The experience of violence by a stronger party has
> historically turned victims into terrorists. Battered children are known
> to become abusive parents and violent adults. You know that. That's what
> happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back.
> State terror very often breeds collective terror.
> Do you recall the fact that the Jews were never terrorists? By and large
> Jews were not known to commit terror except during and after the
> Holocaust. Most studies show that the majority of members of the worst
> terrorist groups in Israel or in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs,
> were people who were immigrants from the most anti-Semitic countries of
> Eastern Europe and Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the
> Palestinians from the refugee camps are battered people. They become very
> violent. The ghettos are violent internally. They become violent
> externally when there is a clear, identifiable external target, an enemy
> where you can say, 'Yes, this one did it to me'. Then they can strike back.
> Example is a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized
> Beirut hijacking of the TWA plane. After that hijacking, there were
> hijacking attempts at nine different American airports. Pathological
> groups or individuals modeling on the others. Even more serious are
> examples set by governments. When governments engage in terror, they set
> very large examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they engage in other sets of examples.
> Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim terrorism.
> Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror. Those of you who are
> familiar with revolutionary theory know the debates, the disputes, the
> quarrels, the fights within revolutionary groups of Europe, the fight
> between anarchists and Marxists, for example. But the Marxists have always
> argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be
> sociologically and psychologically selective. Don't hijack a plane. Don't
> hold hostages. Don't kill children, for God's sake. Have you recalled also
> that the great revolutions, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Algerian, the
> Cuban, never engaged in hijacking type of terrorism? They did engage in
> terrorism, but it was highly selective, highly sociological, still
> deplorable, but there was an organized, highly limited, selective
> character to it. So absence of revolutionary ideology that begins more or
> less in the post-World War II period has been central to this phenomenon.
> My final question is - These conditions have existed for a long time. But
> why then this flurry of private political terrorism? Why now so much of it
> and so visible? The answer is modern technology. You have a cause. You can
> communicate it through radio and television. They will all come swarming
> if you have taken an aircraft and are holding 150 Americans hostage. They
> will all hear your cause. You have a modern weapon through which you can
> shoot a mile away. They can't reach you. And you have the modern means of
> communicating. When you put together the cause, the instrument of coercion
> and the instrument of communication, politics is made. A new kind of politics becomes possible.
> To this challenge rulers from one country after another have been
> responding with traditional methods. The traditional method of shooting it
> out, whether it's missiles or some other means. The Israelis are very
> proud of it. The Americans are very proud of it. The French became very
> proud of it. Now the Pakistanis are very proud of it. The Pakistanis say,
> 'Our commandos are the best.' Frankly, it won't work. A central problem of
> our time, political minds, rooted in the past, and modern times, producing
> new realities. Therefore in conclusion, what is my recommendation to America?
> Quickly. First, avoid extremes of double standards. If you're going to
> practice double standards, you will be paid with double standards. Don't
> use it. Don't condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror,
> El Salvadoran terror, on the one hand, and then complain about Afghan
> terror or Palestinian terror. It doesn't work. Try to be even-handed. A
> superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to
> discourage terrorism in another place. It won't work in this shrunken world.
> Do not condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them. Fight them. Punish
> them. Please eschew, avoid covert operations and low-intensity warfare.
> These are breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and drugs are
> bred there. The structure of covert operations, I've made a film about it,
> which has been very popular in Europe, called Dealing with the Demon. I
> have shown that wherever covert operations have been, there has been the
> central drug problem. That has been also the center of the drug trade.
> Because the structure of covert operations, Afghanistan, Vietnam,
> Nicaragua, Central America, is very hospitable to drug trade. Avoid it.
> Give it up. It doesn't help.
> Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes. Try to look at causes
> and solve problems. Do not concentrate on military solutions. Do not seek
> military solutions. Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy works.
> Take the example of the last attack on Bin Laden. You don't know what
> you're attacking. They say they know, but they don't know. They were
> trying to kill Qadaffi. They killed his four-year-old daughter. The poor
> baby hadn't done anything. Qadaffi is still alive. They tried to kill
> Saddam Hussein. They killed Laila Bin Attar, a prominent artist, an
> innocent woman. They tried to kill Bin Laden and his men. Not one but
> twenty-five other people died. They tried to destroy a chemical factory in
> Sudan. Now they are admitting that they destroyed an innocent factory,
> one-half of the production of medicine in Sudan has been destroyed, not a
> chemical factory. You don't know. You think you know.
> Four of your missiles fell in Pakistan. One was slightly damaged. Two were
> totally damaged. One was totally intact. For ten years the American
> government has kept an embargo on Pakistan because Pakistan is trying,
> stupidly, to build nuclear weapons and missiles. So we have a technology
> embargo on my country. One of the missiles was intact. What do you think a
> Pakistani official told the Washington Post? He said it was a gift from
> Allah. We wanted U.S. technology. Now we have got the technology, and our
> scientists are examining this missile very carefully. It fell into the
> wrong hands. So don't do that. Look for political solutions. Do not look
> for military solutions. They cause more problems than they solve.
> Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international law.
> There was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn't they go to it first to get
> their warrant against Bin Laden, if they have some evidence? Get a
> warrant, then go after him. Internationally. Enforce the U.N. Enforce the
> International Court of Justice, this unilateralism makes us look very
> stupid and them relatively smaller.
> Q&A
> The question here is that I mentioned that I would go somewhat into the
> story of Bin Laden, the Saudi in Afghanistan and didn't do so, could I go
> into some detail? The point about Bin Laden would be roughly the same as
> the point between Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was accused and convicted of
> encouraging the blowing up of the World Trade Center in New York City. The
> New Yorker did a long story on him. It's the same as that of Aimal Kansi,
> the Pakistani Baluch who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA
> agents. Let me see if I can be very short on this. Jihad, which has been
> translated a thousand times as "holy war," is not quite just that. Jihad
> is an Arabic word that means, "to struggle." It could be struggle by
> violence or struggle by non-violent means. There are two forms, the small
> jihad and the big jihad. The small jihad involves violence. The big jihad
> involves the struggles with self. Those are the concepts. The reason I
> mention it is that in Islamic history, jihad as an international violent
> phenomenon had disappeared in the last four hundred years, for all
> practical purposes. It was revived suddenly with American help in the
> 1980s. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the
> military dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an
> opportunity and launched a jihad there against godless communism. The U.S.
> saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what
> Reagan called the Evil Empire. Money started pouring in. CIA agents
> starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the
> great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was not
> only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not only a Saudi. He was also a
> multimillionaire, willing to put his own money into the matter. Bin Laden
> went around recruiting people for the jihad against communism.
> I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official
> of whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I was talking to
> him and said, 'Who are the Arabs here who would be very interesting?' By
> here I meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said, 'You must meet Osama.'
> I went to see Osama. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from
> Algeria, from Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman. This
> fellow was an ally. He remained an ally. He turns at a particular moment.
> In 1990 the U.S. goes into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the
> holy place of Muslims, Mecca and Medina. There had never been foreign
> troops there. In 1990, during the Gulf War, they went in, in the name of
> helping Saudi Arabia defeat Saddam Hussein. Osama Bin Laden remained
> quiet. Saddam was defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land
> of the kaba (the sacred site of Islam in Mecca), foreign troops. He wrote
> letter after letter saying, Why are you here? Get out! You came to help
> but you have stayed on. Finally he started a jihad against the other
> occupiers. His mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His
> earlier mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan. See what I
> was saying earlier about covert operations?
> A second point to be made about him is these are tribal people, people who
> are really tribal. Being a millionaire doesn't matter. Their code of
> ethics is tribal. The tribal code of ethics consists of two words: loyalty
> and revenge. You are my friend. You keep your word. I am loyal to you. You
> break your word, I go on my path of revenge. For him, America has broken
> its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood
> loyalty has betrayed you. They're going to go for you. They're going to do a lot more.
> These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost. This
> is why I said to stop covert operations. There is a price attached to
> those that the American people cannot calculate and Kissinger type of
> people do not know, don't have the history to know.
> Eqbal Ahmad, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Middle
> Eastern Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, also
> served as a managing editor of the quarterly Race and Class. A prolific
> writer, his articles and essays have been published in The Nation, Dawn
> (Pakistan), among several other journals throughout the world. He died in
> 1999. <http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/429/fr3.htm> |
