“THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF ‘TERRORISM’”
July 29, 2014
“The Social Construction of ‘Terrorism’”
is the title of a chapter that Arnold Sherman contributed to a book, Rethinking Criminology, that I edited in
1982. (I can send my scanned copy of the
chapter on email request, if it is not already attached to an email of this
post you are receiving; it is a very timely read.) Arnie traces the consequences of the attempts
of the British colonizers to ban the Kikuyu Mau-Mau as a terrorist organization
in the 1950s. His essay is a reaction to
the newly inaugurated Reagan administration’s declaration of a war on “international
terrorism.” To me, he highlights the
structural violence inherent in the use of the terrorist label. In legal parlance, the label means that the
parties a government is fighting have no standing to be heard. Such has been the case with the Israeli’s
unending failure to talk with the elected governors of Gaza, Hamas…in fact to
treat residents of Gaza as having no recognized voice whatsoever.
To treat one’s opponent as “terrorist” is
implicitly genocidal. It implicitly
defines the opponent as subhuman. In
Gaza, squeezing, destroying, killing, blaming it on Palestinians’ wish to
sacrifice their own children, sadly carries the war into a new generation, with
nothing but bloodshed, misery, destruction and fire in its wake. And that hatred will inevitably extend to the
US Government, which remains unqualified in its arming and unqualified
endorsement of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” It is also sadly reminiscent of the US
government resolute destruction of Native Americans.
The issue is beyond blame. Anti-Semitism as WWII ended touched my own
family. My father’s appointment to the
University of Texas faculty in 1945 was not approved by the regents because he
was a Jew. For the US and British
governments, partition of Palestine was an alternative to welcoming Jewish
refugees into their own countries. I
remember my mother remarking that it was an anachronism for the United Nations
to create a religious state. And indeed
Israelis in turn fought and died for their own national existence in the
aftermath…as they pushed Palestinians out.
What matters is not who started the violence in the region, but
practically speaking, what increases or reduces the level of violence that both
suffer upon one another.
When you can’t talk with your
enemy, you can’t stop fighting. Love and
peace, hal
