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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (32786)	6/20/2002 2:23:21 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

INTERESTING TIMES: Defining terror down By SAUL SINGER To someone in Washington or London, this week's suicide bombings happened on top of me. On their world maps, Israel is so small its name barely fits inside the country. Jerusalem is a speck, and I am inside that exploding speck. Even within Israel, people in Tel Aviv call their friends and family in Jerusalem, concerned for their safety. Here in Jerusalem itself, when a bomb goes off, the distance scale shifts again. For someone who lives in the south of the city, a bomb in the northern part is far away. Once, a bomb went off in a parking lot a couple blocks from me, on a street I drive on daily, about 20 minutes after I passed by. But in my mind this was not a close call, because I didn't hear the bomb go off, and it didn't hurt anyone. The protective armor of the mind grows closer, tighter. Even if I were to be caught close to an attack, my mind could create distance by arguing that I was lucky not to be wounded, or only to be wounded, as the case may be. By a strange inversion, the farther one is from terrorism, the closer it seems to people you know; the closer one is, the better one gets at mental distancing. Craziness becomes relative. Americans think visiting Israel is crazy; Tel Avivians stay away from Jerusalem; Jerusalemites from Ariel; Ariel residents from Kiryat Arba; and Kiryat Arba people are probably a bit skittish when visiting Hebron. Just like "fanatic" is defined as anyone who is more religiously observant than you are, "dangerous" is the word for anywhere you don't go, whether or not there is objectively much difference. A similar process occurs with the definition of a "major" terrorist attack. In 1993, former US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a famous article titled, "Defining Deviancy Down" - about how societies can become inured to increasing social decay. In an interview years later, he explained how he got the idea. Moynihan saw an item buried in The New York Times about seven people having been found dead in an apartment. The article noted that a mother had managed to hide her infant under a bed before she was shot. For the newpaper, the mother's desperate act "was sort of interesting," Moynihan wryly observed. "The fact that seven people had been shot in the back of the head was not interesting at all." In 1929, when Al Capone gunned down seven competing mobsters, Moynihan remembered, it became an American legend dubbed the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In the 1990s, it took a special twist on seven murders for it to even rate a story on page B14. THE SAME process has occurred with terrorism. When the PLO captured the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, German officials appealed to the terrorists to release their hostages because they were creating bad publicity for their own cause. It seemed unthinkable then that the Palestinians would simply murder the Israeli athletes, as they eventually did. In domestic affairs, the process Moynihan identified happens without any directing hand. Crime rates, for example, do not go up because all the criminals get together and decide it is time to become more active. Terrorism is different - its whole purpose is to shock an entire public, or the world. Terrorists must by definition try to top themselves in order to overcome the "defining down" of what is considered a major, newsworthy attack. In this instance, the normally healthy human ability to adapt to almost anything works against us. When we adapt to atrocities, we deny terrorism a victory in one sense, but encourage even more spectacular attacks in another. So how does a society get out of a destructive spiral of "defining deviancy down"? In the cases of crime and other social maladies, a reversal ultimately comes about when leaders go against the tide and begin to make the acceptable unacceptable. We have not yet turned such a corner in the fight against terrorism. On the contrary, the level of terrorism that will trigger a given level of military response is continuing to slide upward. It seems that we are waiting for terrorism to reach a level at which everyone in the world will understand that Yasser Arafat's regime must be replaced. This point may never be reached, however, precisely because the world becomes used to seeing Israel not react decisively to increasing levels of terrorism. Along the way, we are not only defining terrorism down for ourselves, but for the whole world. jpost.com