[excerpts] It’s an incredibly propagandized term, an incredibly propagandistic set of theories that they have. And that’s really what these media outlets are doing, they’re masquerading pro-U.S. government propaganda as expertise, when it’s anything but. These are incredibly ideological people. They’re very loyal to the view of the U.S. government about very controversial questions...the pretense to expertise is incredibly fraudulent. And that’s why they have--not just Steve Emerson, the Fox News strain, but all of them who are held up as the most prominent terrorism experts in the U.S.--have a shameful history of incredible error and all sorts of dubious claims, because they’re just rank propagandists. There’s not even agreement about what the word terrorism means, which is why the old cliché that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist is so resoundingly true. You can have debates about what terrorism is, about who perpetrates it, and yet all of these so-called experts simply assume the answers. Because if they were, for example, to say that the U.S. government is a state sponsor of terrorism by virtue of its support for death squads in El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua or any of the other groups across the world that the United States continues to support that engages in violence against civilians for political ends, you would immediately have them eliminated. No major network like CNN or MSNBC or NBC would ever call somebody like that a terrorism expert, even though that’s a very plausible claim to make. It’s an extremely ideological and politicized view that gets called expertise. There is some amazingly great scholarly research by Rémi Brulin, who was at the Sorbonne and then NYU, where he traces the history of this term in political discourse. And what he has described, in a scholarly way, is that the term terrorism entered and became prevalent in the discourse of international affairs in the late 60s and the early ’70s, when the Israelis sought to use the term to universalize their disputes with their neighbors, so they could say, Were not fighting the Palestinians and we’re not bombing Lebanon over just some land disputes. We’re fighting this concept that is a grave menace to the world, called terrorism. And it’s not only our fight, it’s your fight in the United States, and it’s your fight in Europe, and it’s your fight around the world. And there are all these conferences in the late 60s and early ’70s and into the 1980s even, where Israelis and Americans and neocons are attempting to come up with a definition of the term terrorism that includes the violence that they want to delegitimize--meaning the violence by their adversaries--while excluding the violence they want to legitimize, namely our violence, the violence of Israel, the violence of our allies. And it was virtually impossible to come up with a definition, and thats why there really is no agreed-upon definition. The term is incredibly malleable, because it’s typically just meant any violence we don’t like is something we’re going to call terrorism. I mean, you know, if you listen to Jeanine Pirro--that clip you just played--she’s obviously psychotic...that’s just bloodthirsty fascism in its purest expression. But I don’t think that the substance of what she’s saying--to the extent one can attribute substance to those comments--is really all that rare or even controversial in the U.S. I mean, we have been a country that has declared ourselves at war with some formulation of Islam, radical Muslims, whatever you want to call it, something that John Kerry actually just affirmed a few days ago, that the French president and others have embraced, as well, over the last week. if you are an American citizen or a French citizen or a British citizen, you have a greater chance of being killed by slipping in the bathtub tonight and hitting your head on the ceramic tile, or being struck by lightning—literally—than you do dying in a terrorist attack. And yet these terrorism experts constantly hype and exaggerate the threat and fearmonger over it, because that’s how they become relevant...in terms of their government contracts and in terms of the money that they make. And it really has infected large parts of Western thinking to view terrorism as a much, much greater threat than just rationally and statistically it really is...a big part of that is at the feet of these so-called terrorism experts...And they don’t even have the basic attributes of what we generally consider that makes somebody an expert. I remember at the Oklahoma City bombing attack, two names of Arab men were floated. It turned out they were New York taxi drivers who had gone to Oklahoma City to renew their licenses. But those names were put out by the media, and then there was the question: Was this a terrorist attack? When it turned out it was Timothy McVeigh—who worked with other people, had all the definition of a terrorist attack—then it wasn’t. Oh, no, it was Timothy McVeigh, and he did this, a white Christian man. No longer did we refer to it as a terrorist attack. if you watch how these attacks are discussed, every time there’s an attack where the assailant or the perpetrator is unknown, the media will say it’s unknown whether or not terrorism is involved. And what they really mean by that is: It’s unknown whether or not the perpetrator is Muslim. And as soon as they discover that the perpetrator is a Christian or is American, a white American, they’ll say, We now have confirmation that this is not a terrorist attack. It’s something else—someone who’s mentally unstable, some extremist, something like that. It is a term that functionally now means nothing other than Muslims who engage in violence against the West. [read more or watch in link below. DemocracyNow! airs on WNYU, weekdays at 6pm Eastern Time, and is available online.]
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:12:07 +0000
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