This week has been pretty intense for the United States. It always seems when crazy folks attack public places that they come in groups. We have once again witnessed this phenomenon in the past week.
We are also currently experiencing another phenomenon, which I noticed, but can’t quite figure out. In all of the coverage of these attacks at Virginia Tech and at a NASA facility in Houston, I have not once heard the word “terrorism.” Now it is likely that I have just missed it. I only listen to NPR and read BBC and BBC Arabic online for news. So, I am not hearing the FOX news or CNN perspective on such things. However, in a quick scan of their websites just now, I was unable to find the words “terrorism, terrorist,” or “terrorist attack” in reference to the attacks carried out in Virginia and in Texas.
This worries me for several reasons: 1) If these are not examples of terrorism, then what are they? Why didn’t our brains and news-media immediately think “terrorism” when we heard about these events? 2) This may be an example of the continued conflation of the words and concepts “terrorism” and “Islam.” If either of the individuals had been Arab or identified as Muslim, would we be talking about “terrorists” and “terrorist attacks” right now rather than “gunmen” and “incidents?” 3) We are suddenly interested in the mental health of criminals and gun control whenever someone gets a little down, buys a gun, kills a bunch of people, and then blows his own brains out. Why aren’t we concerned about this all the time? Why have we forgotten about all of the other “incidents” involving crazed “gunmen?”
I am not certain why many Americans didn’t think “terrorism” when they first heard about these attacks on the news. Though, it is a good bet that we didn’t do so because we haven’t heard the word on the news at all this week. Are we not calling this “terrorism” because there isn’t a political motive, a group effort, or a video with a guy in a mask? The motivation of the first attack, which we know, was that this maladjusted kid at Virginia Tech found his classmates to be terrible debauched people that he could no longer stand to be around. This sounds like a motive to me. His method for dealing with his concerns also mirrors the methods of other terrorists. The Michigan Militia comes to mind.
So why didn’t we call him a terrorist?
I assert that we did not refer to this or the other attacker as terrorists because they did not fit into the rubric which we have collectively designed for identifying terrorists and examples of terrorism. This rubric has less to do with the identification of political motives, and more to do with cultural and racial profiling. We have completely conflated the words “terrorism,” and “terrorist” with the following list of words: “Islam,” “Muslim,” “Arab,” and “Jihad.” These are dangerous conflations, and this is not the first time in history that such a thing as occurred, and also not the first time that it has occurred with essentially the same group of people.
During the crusades, there was a group of Muslims, known in the Muslim world as the IsmÄ‘īlÄ«s—though there was a particularly militant group commonly referred to as the ḤashishÄ«yya due to rumors of their liberal use of hashish. This group became renowned for their brutal but stealthy attacks against crusaders in what is now Syria and Lebanon. They developed such a reputation that rumors began to spread about them carrying out attacks in Europe as well, under the employ of the monarchs of various countries. In other words, when any attempt on the life of a European monarch occurred, rumors would spread that someone had hired a group of ḤashishÄ«yya to carry out the attack, and that it was indeed they that had made the attempt.
These rumors are the reason for the coinage of the word “assassin” in Romance languages, German, English, et al. This word “assassin”—an adaptation of ḤashishÄ«yya—was then used to refer to any attack, as described above. In this way, a specific type of attack was associated until the very present, with a group of Muslim warriors in Syria.
I feel that the same thing is occurring now with terrorism. We are beginning to only refer to terrorism in terms of Islamic fundamentalism, Muslim terrorists, Jihadists, et cetera. This is especially disconcerting because of the historical analogue which can be drawn with the Assassins.
The point is that we should be increasingly careful of the words that we use to describe the events and situations around us. We, as United States citizens, are particularly guilty of not being careful about offensive, damaging, and disparaging language. Just set foot in any college bar or frat-house and you will hear endless discussions about the supposed homosexuality of: other people, academic situations, television shows, rules, laws, or anything else that can be referred to as “gay.” This is a another prime example of the conflation of a term which refers to a particularly sensitive, easily discriminated, continually disparaged group with a negative sentiment.
There is no easy way to deal with this problem, but there is an effective way. We can begin pointing out terrorism in any form, wherever we see it, rather than just talking about terrorism which occurs in the middle east. We can write “letters to the editor” when we see language being misused, or when we see inaccuracies in reporting, or when we see that something is not being called what it is in the media. We can also start being honest about what we are seeing in the world.
If we see an example of a young man who walks into a classroom and fires round after round into classmates and teacher—and finally his own head—and we deem that he must have been mentally ill, or at least mentally unbalanced, then we must start applying the same standards to other forms of terrorism. Young men who strap bombs to their chests, walk onto a bus, and kill the people around and themselves in the process are mentally unstable. Maligned promises of paradise aside, these men cannot be mentally stable if they are willing to commit such an act, and yet we remain unconcerned. We blame a religion, painting it with broad strokes, for coercing them into destroying their lives and the lives of others. We discuss the political situations which we believe drive men to such extremes of behavior. Why do we never discuss the mental health of these men?
We never even think in these terms because we, as United States citizens, have the ability to place a label of “other” on these people, because they have dark skin, live across an ocean, and because we have the misconception that the region in which they live has been embroiled in war since time immemorial. This is nothing more that pure Orientalism still rearing its ugly head. We can justify our negative thoughts and feelings against these people because we cannot identify with them.
We can, on the other hand, somehow identify with this boy at Virginia Tech and this NASA contractor enough to be concerned about their mental health and the burden of shame which their actions have placed upon their families. We can do this because they we born here and live here, and would essentially identify themselves as “Americans.” At the end of the day, we blame ourselves for their actions. We blame ourselves for not noticing their odd behavior before such events; we blame our poor implementation and enforcement of gun-control legislation. We do not blame ourselves for suicide bombers in Jerusalem, because it is not happening in our backyard. Unfortunately, these things are happening in our backyard. Unrest is unrest, and it happens here, as well as world-wide, and causes all manner of violence and harm to people at the hands of their neighbors. We’re all neighbors now: communications technologies, ease of international travel, and globalization of markets and commerce have made us neighbors. Now, we just have to learn how to deal with each other, because we don’t have a choice.
