Who Is a Terrorist? (updated)

Last week, a desperate and angry man killed himself and an office worker in an attack so reminiscent of 9/11 that it begs the questions, why is this man not considered a terrorist? Could it be that he didn’t kill enough people? Maybe that he’s white? Maybe it’s that he doesn’t seem to be of the Muslim faith? Maybe the Obama administration is terrified of the response should this be labeled such. Or perhaps, what I think is most likely the issue, it’s that the conservatives find sympathy not in the actions but in his cause and given the lack of blood this becomes palatable for them.

As political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire: because violence has become less legitimate in the world, the term ‘terrorism’ can be applied more often to occurring violence.

Perhaps the declining ability of states to legitimate the violence they exercise can explain, at least in part, why there have appeared in recent decades increasingly strident and confused accusations of terrorism. In a world where no violence can be legitimated, all violence can potentially be called terrorism. As we noted earlier, the contemporary definitions of terrorism are all variable and depend on who defines their central elements: legitimate government, human rights, and rules of war. The difficulty of constructing a stable and coherent definition of terrorism is intimately linked to the problem of establishing an  adequate notion of legitimate violence.

It seems then that conservatives, in their hatred of taxation and government deem this act to be legitimate. Republican Representative Steve King excused the act saying that “it’s going to be a happy day” when the IRS is abolished. I wonder what the Representative would have thought after 9/11 if a peer of his said it would be a happy day when the Pentagon was abolished? As happy as I’d be to have the Pentagon turned into a hospital or other such publicly useful device, if asked in the context of terrorism – I would hope no one would excuse such events.

This seems to be the crux of the “terrorism” argument. The fact that over time it’s definition has changed drastically and in contemporary usage it doesn’t even really seem to have a meaning. It’s simply a frame, it is said to scare not to define an act or idea. Because the United States is more powerful than those who oppose it, and because it defines the status quo it controls this frame. If a white man carries out an act virtually the same as the 9/11 events, in today’s world that is not terrorism.

In 2008 we had to listen to Sarah Palin repeatedly claim that Barack Obama “palled around with terrorists” referring of course to his tenuous relationship with former Weather Underground member, Bill Ayers. Weather Underground, a radical left group that used Black Liberation and dictatorship of the proletariat as central goals in their bombings of government buildings (and they never killed anyone) is labeled terrorist, while Mr. Stack after killing himself and another person in an attack against a government building is not. ACORN, a community organizing group that helps poor and people of color participate in their government is repeatedly accused of defending terrorists. If this definition persists, “terrorism” becomes a racist term, referring to non-whites (or whites working for some form of racial equality) who act against America’s imperial ambitions.