Another "terrorist attack"

[hudebnik]

Just heard a news story on the radio, as President Trump sent his condolences to the people of Paris about "another terrible terrorist attack" yesterday. The attack in question involved a guy with a gun going to a public place, killing one person and wounding three others. Terrible, yes, by European standards... but the same attack in the U.S. wouldn't even make national news, because it happens LITERALLY EVERY DAY here, because we have more guns than people, with almost no controls on who can have one or carry it in public places.

Comments

[hazard]

true story - happens everyday.... though if I recall , didn't the shooter claim he was doing it for religious reasons or some other rot? So the media swamps it up.

I feel so sorry for the Muslims in this country right now .... I can't imagine how scary and horrifying it would be if a super small crazy sect of pagans were running around killing and maiming people compounding already existing prejudices and bigotry.

[hudebnik]

I haven't followed the news stories of this particular attack closely. I heard that ISIS had "claimed credit" for the attacker, who is now dead and not in a position to confirm or deny that.

Of course, when a white Christian in the U.S. bombs an abortion clinic, a mosque, a synagogue, a black Baptist church, or a government office building, citing "religious reasons", the news media don't describe it as an act of terrorism. It only counts as terrorism if you call yourself (or look like) a Moslem.

If you hadn't read/seen/heard any news stories in the past fifty years and heard the word "terrorism", how would you define it? Etymologically, it obviously has to do with terror; with a little bit of context, one could conclude that it means using high-visibility violence (or the threat thereof) to create terror in order to achieve political ends that you couldn't achieve through the normal political process. In particular, it involves high-visibility violence against ordinary people to create terror among ordinary people. It's defined by the choice of targets. A similar attack on a military base might be considered an act of war, even guerrilla warfare, but not terrorism because it's not aimed at terrifying ordinary people. [And one expects the military base to be more capable of defending itself than ordinary people out shopping.]

But since (at least) 9/11, the narrative from Western governments and mainstream news media has presented a different definition, based on the perpetrators rather than the targets. Terrorism is politically-motivated, highly-visible violence (or the threat thereof) by non-state actors, especially those ethnically or religiously different from the person using the word "terrorism". In this narrative, the evil of terrorism isn't that it victimizes ordinary, innocent people, but rather that it threatens the State's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. A State is allowed to attack ordinary, innocent people in order to create widespread terror in furtherance of political ends, but a non-state actor (especially one who "looks funny") isn't.