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How to Define Terrorism
By Yashiko Sagamori
December 30, 2002
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At one time, US lawmakers wasted a lot of effort trying to outlaw pornography. The main reason pornography is still enjoying the First Amendment protection is the failure of every single attempt to give it a legal definition.
I don't believe it is even theoretically possible to legally define terrorism.
One might try to define terrorism as deliberate targeting of innocent civilians. However, the very concept of "innocent civilians" is extremely shaky. The enemy perspective is best expressed in one of the recent letters attributed to Osama bin Laden and aired a few weeks ago by al
Jazeera. The Western countries, along with Israel, are democracies. In a democracy, governments are supposed to carry out the will of their people. Therefore, it is precisely the "innocent civilians" that are ultimately responsible for the indignities and oppression suffered by the Moslems worldwide at the hands of Western governments. Therefore, Moslems do not have the luxury to say, like the American government does, that our enemy is not the people but the ruling regime. Their enemy is precisely the people — our "innocent civilians". I see no flaw in their logic, even though I obviously disagree with their goals.
Let's now take a look at "innocent civilians" from our side of the fence. An article in today's New York Times describes a quintessential innocent civilian — a 10-year-old boy from Tulkarim named Abdul — shot to death by an Israeli soldier. The article, among other things, tells us that Abdul was described by his friends as the smartest kid in his class and that his dream was to become a martyr. Unfortunately for everyone, Abdul wasn't smart enough to abstain from throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, which was exactly how he became a martyr. Fortunately for us, this was not the kind of martyrdom Abdul had in mind: he did not die killing infidels. I can't help asking an ultimately cynical question: how many Israeli or American children would I be willing to sacrifice to allow him to grow up and fulfill his dream? Would four yeshiva students be enough to pay for Abdul's 77 eternal virgins, or should it be something on the scale of September 11?
(I have to admit that it took me a long time to develop this kind of thinking. But Arabs have worked hard for it and eventually they succeeded.)
Of course, kids' dreams mature with age, and chances are that, instead of a mass murderer, Abdul might become a brilliant scientist or a leader who would've taken the Arab world from its hopeless, eternal misery towards the heights of human
enlightment. Hard to imagine of course, but stranger things are known to have happened. But what about the grown up "innocent civilians" who had instilled those murderous dreams in the mind of that recent victim of the intifada and hundreds of thousands of children around him? What about his parents? What about his school teachers? What about the imam in his mosque? They are all civilians, but are they all that innocent? If we are sincere in our desire for peace, shouldn't we admit that those people are infinitely more dangerous to us than those who are allegedly (as the New York Times would put it) running around with AK-47s and explosives belts?
Besides, deliberate targeting of civilians does not necessarily constitute terrorism. For example, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets for the American bombardment in August 1945 despite the fact that there were no military objects in either of the cities. Not a single one. These cities, along with approximately 150 thousand of innocent civilians that used to live there, were destroyed in order to force Japan to surrender. It worked: Japan surrendered. Therefore, one's assessment of that bombardment depends on one's view on the legitimacy of the American goals. If you are on our side, you take into account the millions of lives, both American and Japanese, but mostly Japanese, spared because Japan no longer had to be taken by force. If you are a supporter of the Japanese goals in WWII, what the US did to Japan was nothing but mass murder on an unprecedented scale.
Following that logic, since Israel has no right to exist and "terrorism" is the pejorative of the day, the Arabs tailor their own definition of terrorism in such a way that everything an Israeli does, including even the breathing, becomes an act of terrorism, while every crime committed by an Arab becomes a heroic act of legitimate resistance. That approach appears disgustingly immoral to us only because we do not share their goals. In fact, theirs — unlike our own — is a perfectly reasonable approach. A la guerre comme a la guerre.
From our own perspective, an Arab terrorist on his way to a martyrdom operation remains an innocent civilian up until the moment he ties the bomb belt around his waist. But even then all he has to do to remain immune to any possible attempt to prevent the planned mass murder is to make sure that the explosives are not immediately visible: as long as they remain hidden under his clothes, he is considered an innocent civilian. Arab women that led Israeli soldiers into a deadly trap in Jenin remained, according to the Geneva Convention, innocent civilians not only before and after taking part in the battle, but during it as well: at no time were they carrying arms. Moslem clerics calling for the extermination of all Jews, teachers at PA schools indoctrinating their pupils in practical ways of achieving that goal, PA ambulance drivers delivering ammunition to people we call terrorists -- they are all innocent civilians and, therefore, untouchable to us.
Whose point of view is more consistent with their struggle? Obviously, our enemy's.
The suicidal component of many terrorist acts cannot serve as a defining characteristic either. There are at least three reasons for it. First, from the Jewish perspective, I don't see how one method of exterminating Jews can be more acceptable than another. Second, many terrorist acts are not designed to sacrifice the perpetrator's life. And third, depending on one's position, a suicide bombing can be legitimately viewed as an ultimate act of heroism. Wouldn't you, whatever side you are on, when left no other choice, give your life willingly to defend what's dear to you?
Finally, it might seem to be a step in the right direction to define terrorism as any act that violates the Geneva Convention, regardless of whether the perpetrator of such act signed the convention or not. However the entire historical experience of Israel proves that such an approach would only work in a much better world than ours. In our world, terrorists do not really care whether we call them terrorists or not as long as our hands remain tied by conventions that they themselves do not have to follow. Therefore, such definition would not make the life any easier for the "good guys". To prove the futility of this approach — or any attempt to build a legal basis under our struggle for survival — consider the overwhelming international support enjoyed by the PA despite all their violations of every single law of humanity, not just the Geneva Convention, which they, not being a state, have never had an opportunity to sign. Everything is in the eye of the beholder.
Consider a hypothetical example of a gunfight between two men armed with identical guns, using the same type of ammo, and possessing comparable fighting skills. For the sake of the argument, let us further assume that both are Irish Catholic males in their late twenties, that both grew up in the same area of Brooklyn, NY, that both wear jeans and sweaters of the same color with no insignia on them, and that you have no clue as to how the fight started and what each of the opponents is hoping to achieve if he wins it. By the time you arrive at the scene, the fight is going full steam, so that each of the gunmen can claim he is acting in self-defense. You will have no way to choose sides until someone explains to you that the guy on the left is an undercover cop trying to apprehend the guy on the right who had escaped from jail after serving only two weeks of his life sentence that he had received for torturing an old lady to death and brutally raping her quadriplegic grandson. Only then will you be able to choose whom to root for according to your own ideas of right and wrong.
Apparently, it's not just what people do, but also what they are trying to achieve by doing it. In other words, it's not just the means, it's also the ends. And it is even theoretically impossible assess the ends without passing a moral judgment.
To prevent a possible misunderstanding, let me emphasize that I am not saying here that ends justify the means. You may be woefully underpaid and long overdue for a promotion, but if you attempt to gain what's rightfully due to you by abducting, raping and killing your boss's infant daughter, your unfortunate choice of means will guarantee that gaining the well deserved promotion will never be on the list of possible outcomes of your undertaking. (By the way, isn't that exactly what the Arabs residing in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria have been doing since the inception of the "Palestinian people" in 1967 — assuming their claims to those territories were not entirely baseless even before they resorted to terrorism?)
Arabs sincerely believe that Israel has no legitimacy and the land is rightfully theirs. That makes every crime they commit against us an act of heroism in their own eyes. Our views and opinions are of no concern to them, nor should they be. There is no universal concept of good and evil. They have their own ethics, we have ours.
So, what should we do in the absence of internationally recognized legal basis for our rather feeble attempts to defend ourselves? Only one thing: free ourselves of the corruption of moral relativism, ignore the irrelevant opinions of the Europeans, and summon the necessary courage to use our superb military might to enforce our own concepts of good and evil, our own understanding of right and wrong with the maximum efficiency and minimum loss of life on our side. This is equally true for Israel in its suffering from the never ending pan-Arab war against it and the United States in its War on Terrorism. After all, every passing day brings new evidence that the two wars are actually one and the same.
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