catapult magazine

Putting this topic under “current events” assumes that terrorism is a recent phenomenon. But this is essentially my question. Is terrorism a new form of battle invented by Palestine, as the writer Dershowitz suggests?

I think people are right in saying the U.S. uses terror as a weapon just as much as the next guy, but then what is this new phenomenon? It happened again in Russia. Because Chechnya does not have a strong enough army to fight Russia, it resorts to “terrorism”. But it’s not really terrorism, is it?

This new style of engaging in battle poses a great threat to “civilized” nations that have invested millions of dollars in armies and high-tech weaponry (If people can blow up buildings with the help of simple box-cutters, then we’ve put our defense money in the wrong place). Perhaps the U.S. isn’t in a war against “terrorism”, but is instead fighting against the use of “uncivilized” battle tactics.

You know, I’ve got some serious problems with this whole terrorism fad. To me, the definition of terrorism is something along the lines of ‘violence meant to instill terror in a certain group of people’, but it seems that most americans use it as a euphemism for ‘muslim violence’.

Exhibit A: The FBI said that they would become involved in the sniper investigation as soon as there was an indication that it was related to terrorism. Implying that if the violence came from a certain source (i.e. muslims), then it would immediately become an instance of terrorism. But if it was an american, then it would just be the work of a ‘wacko’.

Exhibit B: After the killing of the US diplomat in Jordan, US officials claim that there’s no reason to suspect terrorism. Well, it should be fairly obvious based only on act itself whether it was terrorism or not. The word terrorism is absolutely useless if you only declare it terrorism after you determine that it was committed by a certain group of people. The identity of the perpetrators should not even enter into the discussion when you’re deciding whether something is terrorism or not.

Nobody seems to question these things, though. It seems widely accepted among the American public that terrorism = radical islamic violence. (maybe because it doesn’t sound as good to “wage war against radical muslim violence” despite the fact that that’s really what we’re doing).

In response to some of Grant’s questions, I don’t believe at all that terrorism was invented by palestine. I haven’t read what Dershowitz had to say about it, and i really should do some research into this (it would be a very interesting topic to research anyway), but my guess is that the thing that we call terrorism has been around for centuries. Perhaps Dershowitz is right inasmuch as we only really started calling it terrorism in regard to the palestine/israeli conflict.

Another interesting question would be: is terrorism really ‘on the rise’, or is it just getting more media attention? An interesting bit from Michael Moore’s new film “Bowling for Columbine” (regardless of whether you agree with him or not) was a claim that violent crimes have actually decreased in the last 10 years or so, but coverage of violent crimes in the media has increased 600% in that same time period. Is terrorism just this year’s shark attack media frenzy? And if it is really on the rise, why? My personal view is that it’s an outgrowth of the increasing polarization between the world’s ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. But that’s obviously a bit simplistic.

Grant makes a good point about the uselessness of hi-tech weaponry agains this sort of thing. To me there’s only a couple of options. A) become a police state and restrict freedom to the extent that people can’t get away with this kind of thing, or B) work to alleviate the root causes. And if I’m right about the root causes, then military action would only increase the polarization between the haves and have-nots, and be counter-productive.

As for the whole chechnya conflict: here, have some pictures of grozny:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/europe/638309.stm
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/world/0002/russia.chechnya/frameset.exclude.html
http://home.pacbell.net/burzum/chechnya/chechnya2.html

Pictures as weapons. By posting pictures of death and destruction, you’re using terrorist tactics, Jonner. Of course, our nation uses the media as a weapon too, both in what it does and does not show.

I find it interesting that Osama Bin Laden has used our own media frenzy to signal more attacks. According to the FBI, Osama Bin Laden may be sending signals with his eyes, gestures and words in television broadcasts. Knowing that the U.S. media will display these broadcasts every ten minutes on all the news broadcasts, Bin Laden is then able to initiate attacks from his hiding place. Bin Laden is able to communicate with his terrorist cells within the U.S. by using the media obsession of America against itself.

Incidentally, I learned recently that the idea of using the enemy’s strength against itself is the main philosophy of the martial arts. Might this philosophy be reflective of battle technique in the East?

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