There is some amazingly great scholarly research by Rémi Brulin, who was at the Sorbonne and then NYU, where he traces, essentially, the history of this term in political discourse. And what he has described, in a very scholarly way, is that the term terrorism really 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 of great—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 legitimizing—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 as a term that says any violence we don’t like is something we’re going to call terrorism. And at this point it really just means violence engaged in by Muslims against the West. That’s really the definition of the term terrorism, the functional definition. It has no fixed definition.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:24:51 +0000
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