Yet another attack on a mosque has been attempted, this time involving a home-made explosive device rather than arson. Some have been asking whether it would be accurate and appropriate to describe this as a terrorist attack.
One of the objections made to Glenn Greenwald’s post ‘Was the London killing of a British soldier terrorism’ (and there were many) was that he failed to engage fully with the question he set out to answer. Clearly this is contested issue. Without having a precise definition of ‘terrorism’ in my mind I thought the Woolwich murder was terrorism because it was carried out for political motives, and drew attention to that fact, with a view to changing something about society – in this case foreign policy. This seemed in tune with what I found on the first (perhaps not very authoritative) site I went to in search of definitions. Here are three proposed simple definitions, and I’d say the Woolwich attack fits the first and third definition, but perhaps not the second as it was not really ‘systematic’.
– The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
– systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal
– the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
Terrorism does seem to be a rather fluid and subjective term, and I think there is a case to be made for saying it is applied more readily to certain sorts of crime, and certain sorts of perpetrator, than others. This is, I infer, the view taken by those who were questioning why the word ‘terrorism’ isn’t being used of the Walsall mosque incident. Terrorism does not have to involve killing – and I think it is reasonable to see some of the actions associated with anti-Muslim bigots as ‘terrorist’, though these are not at the worst end of the spectrum generally, neither so calculated nor so murderous as the foiled plot to target EDL protestors (an incident which surely satisfied most definitions of terrorism).
Here’s a brief conversation I was involved in last night in which the difficulty of defining terrorism is touched on. Judging by the Wikipedia entry on definitions of terrorism it is perhaps impossible to fix on a single satisfactory definition. For example several definitions specify that terrorism must be targeted against non-combatants/civilians, which is why some questioned the use of the term when applied to the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. This, the second listed, by Schmid and Jorgman, was an interesting definition I thought.
“Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi)clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby—in contrast to assassination—the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperiled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought”.
This does seem to me to fit the profile of semi-organised anti-Muslim activity reasonably well. Here are some examples of ‘Threat- and violence-based communication processes’ at work.
Finally – it’s very important to remember that the word ‘terrorism’, in so far as it is meaningful at all, does not equate to ‘the worst sort of crime/murder’. Many of the most distressing murders of all, those involving children for example, meet none of the key criteria of terrorism.
