Terrorist

A few days after the massacre of civilians in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, the BBC was criticised by Jewish groups, Conservative newspapers, and a chorus of MPs, including the leaders of both main political parties, for not referring to the perpetrators as ‘terrorists’. It is surprising that the political nation should respond to a terrible atrocity by conducting an argument about the use of a word. And within that argument, it is perhaps even more surprising that anger should focus not, as usually happens, on something that was offensively said, but exactly on what was not said. The protestors had a specific, favoured term, and were outraged when they did not hear it. This suggests a sort of super-censorship, a regime which, not content with telling broadcasters what they mustn't say, seeks positively to dictate what they must say. Indeed, the point was pressed in just that form when Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President, told the world's press that they ‘must declare and call Hamas a terrorist organization without ifs and buts, without explanation’.¹ On what basis does the head of a democratic state issue instructions to independent journalists about their detailed lexical choices? And why this particular word?

Obviously the word itself is contested ground. In a despairing tour de force Alex P. Schmid, a leading academic in the field, compiled 250 different definitions of ‘terrorism’, the great majority of them formulated between 1970 and 2010.² It is not surprising that such a heavily debated term should prove to be a flash point at a moment of crisis. On the other hand, it is puzzling that its use is so passionately required (or resisted) when there is such a spectacular lack of certainty about what it actually means. Its clarity seems to be of a different kind, a definiteness that is independent of definition. The people who use it, or who insist on its use, may not be sure of its meaning, but they know very well what they mean by using it. As Schmid notes at the head of his article, the British ambassador to the UN, speaking shortly after 9/11, brushed aside the whole business of defining one's terms: ‘What looks, smells and kills like terrorism is terrorism’.³ This is to ground the meaning of the word in a gut feeling; it expresses an encounter with the concept which is not intellectual and analytic, but sensory and immediate. It thus goes some way to explain the heat of the debate. The belief that this is the right word to use is visceral.

It is a coherent position, but the trouble with it is that it treats the word as if it were only emotive, and therefore fails to acknowledge that it does also, despite everything, have definite referential content. A glance at those 250 definitions is enough to see that, for all their differences, they converge on a substantive if approximate object. For example, the US State Department's working definition from 2006 is that terrorism is ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents’.⁶ This formula does a good deal of work, distinguishing terrorist acts from spontaneous explosions of rage (‘premeditated’), from ordinary violent crimes (‘politically motivated’), from regular warfare (‘perpetrated against noncombatant targets’), and from the direct actions, however destructive, of recognised nation states (‘subnational groups or clandestine agents’). It is no doubt open to objections – that its terms need defining in their turn, or that there are crucial elements which it leaves out. But the lines it does draw seem to me to be broadly consensual: this is indeed, roughly, what most people take the word to mean. And it has the additional virtue – a striking one in the context – of being, in itself, nonjudgemental. It does not define terrorism as morally wrong, it merely attempts to say what it consists of. It therefore demonstrates that the word is not reducible to its pejorative function. It has a denotative dimension as well.

At this point it is easy enough to appreciate the mutual exasperation of the disputants. The BBC sees the negative connotation of ‘terrorism’ rather than its referential meaning, and therefore hears the injunction to use the word as an attempt to subvert its own time-honoured impartiality. Its critics see the referential meaning rather than the connotation, so to them it seems that the BBC is perversely refusing to call something by its right name. The two sides cannot catch what each other is saying because they are standing, as it were, on different levels within the structure of the word.

However, this symmetrical stand-off does not do justice to the way words mean. They are not arbitrary names (even derogatory ones); they have their own distinctive life in language, their etymons, collocations, and so on. In this case the formation is very simple: as OED puts it, it is ‘terror n. + -ist suffix’. The root noun has been explicitly present from the beginning (the first ‘terrorists’ were the exponents of the reign of terror in revolutionary France), and it was restored to prominence by George W. Bush's declaration of a ‘war on terror’ in 2001.⁷ The actual enemy in this war is of course not literally ‘terror’, but Islamist terrorists, and in particular Al-Qaeda, the organisation responsible for the 9/11 attacks. But the easy movement back and forth between ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’, and ‘terrorist’, widely copied in journalistic short cuts such as ‘terror attack’ or ‘antiterror laws’, has the subliminal effect of equating particular militant groups with fear itself. Any word with ‘terror’ in it does not merely point to the operational characteristics coolly enumerated by the State Department; it also says, ‘this is what we are terrified of’, even, implicitly, ‘this is everything we are terrified of’. This universalisation of the threat is then intensified by the suffix. ‘Terrorism’ has access, relatively speaking, to the sphere of reasonable discourse: for instance it denotes a strategy which a revolutionary organisation might intelligibly (if deplorably) decide to adopt. But ‘terrorists’, by analogy with, say, ‘nationalists’ or ‘pacifists’, sound like people who believe in terror. They may believe in other things too – a religious faith, a mission to combat oppression – but these motivations are rendered marginal by the morphology of the word. It is the terrorists' terrible actions that form the essence of who they are.

In this light the opposition between referential and emotive, denotation and connotation, looks too abstract. The ‘subjective’ reaction suggested by the word ‘terrorist’ is not the ‘disapproval’ genteelly imagined by Simpson – it is, wholly explicitly, terror. And that emotion is not an adventitious response tacked on to a concept which could be adequately conveyed without it: the dynamics of the word carry it deep into the nomination of the object itself. Fear, the word tells us, is the whole point. There is not a zero-degree person first, and then a fearful shrinking from him second. There is an inherently fearful person; if it is a ‘loaded word’, the word and the load are one.

What that means, among other things, is that a ‘terrorist’ must be someone other than the speaker. This is a quasi-grammatical rule, comically visible in a glitch (presumably it was a glitch, though hardly an innocent one) recently encountered on Instagram. A user discovered by a few substitution tests that if he put the Arabic expression ‘alhamdulillah’ into his bio, the ‘see translation’ feature rendered it, accurately enough, as ‘Praise be to God’, but that if the bio also included the word ‘Palestinian’, or a Palestinian flag, the auto-translation of ‘alhamdulillah’ turned into ‘Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom’.⁸ The effect was a weird moment of ventriloquism. The expression ‘Palestinian terrorists’ belongs to a speaker to whom the people it names are fundamentally alien, but then it has been mechanically imputed to a speaker who is in solidarity with them. The resulting incongruity makes the linguistic rule manifest: ‘terrorists’ must be them, and cannot be us.

This brings us to the structural heart of the matter. To insist that the perpetrators of the atrocity be called terrorists signals a ban on all attempts to imagine what it would be like to identify with them, or to admire them, or to be them. They are not us, we have nothing in common with them, an unbridgeable gulf between our lives and theirs is built into the word by which they are to be known. The separation often takes legal forms: in many countries, designated terrorist organisations are proscribed in spite of a general principle of freedom of association, or individuals accused of terrorist offences are denied the usual rights of suspects – in short, ‘terrorist’ as a term in law denotes someone who is not recognised as a citizen in the normal sense. This legal force flows directly back into the argument around the word: one reason for making sure that certain people are called terrorists is that it entitles the state to take extrajudicial measures against them. For some right-wing politicians, indeed, the legal position is the beginning and end of the debate. The UK Secretary of State for Defence, Grant Shapps, attacking the BBC on the Today programme on 13 October, stressed that Hamas is listed as a terrorist organisation in Schedule 2 of the Terrorism Act 2000; he concluded from this fact that to call Hamas ‘terrorists’ is merely to comply with the law. But this line of argument is at once authoritarian and parochial, not only because the BBC's broadcasts extend well beyond the jurisdiction of the British Government, but also because an Act of Parliament, while it can direct the interpretation of a word by the courts, cannot legitimately claim the same influence over the general speech community. The question is not what the Secretary of State means by ‘terrorist’, but what the rest of us mean by it.

And here I think the communal expulsion enacted by the word – the ineradicable message to the effect that terrorists are other – runs deeper than its legal application. One of the things that clearly distinguish terrorist acts, after all, is that they are the weapons of the powerless. Suicide bombings, IEDs, hostage-taking, hijackings and assassinations – no organisation would resort to these methods if it had any hope of inflicting real military or political defeat on its enemies. They are ways of denting or disrupting a status quo which is massively prevalent. Typically, the group that perpetrates these things is fighting not as it would choose but as it can. A terrorist, on this view, is a combatant starting from a position of overwhelming disadvantage. To say this is not an expression of sympathy: the reason for the disadvantage might be admirable (the ‘terrorists’ are fighting for the disenfranchised and downtrodden), but it might equally be despicable (the ‘terrorists’ espouse values which are so deranged that they cannot attract support by legitimate means). That is not the point. Rather, it is to register that ‘terrorist’, whatever its other complexities, is mostly a term applied by the strong, well-resourced and established to the weak, poor and marginal. That divisiveness is the reason why its use, however aggressively insisted upon, is unlikely to become consensual.