On Justifying Terrorism
As the UK government moves to make it a crime to justify terrorist acts, I have to ask: don’t mainstream journalists justify terrorism every time they use the phrase ‘in response to’ in a description of terrorist acts, as they are particularly accustomed to doing when reporting on the conflict between the state of Israel and Palestinians?
Regular readers will know from previous articles on this site that I’m no fan of the UK government’s apparent reluctance to engage in fact-based analysis of the terrorist threat (“A Terrorist Speaks; Is Anyone Listening?”), and its seeming desire to eliminate open public discussion about the psychology of terrorism — lest it might smack of ‘justifying terrorism’.
However, even as the UK government presses on with its efforts to restrict public debate and discourse that might ‘justify’ terrorist acts, I do actually find myself in unusual agreement with the idea in one very specific and very narrow sense — the usage, by mainstream journalists, of the phrase ‘in response to’ when describing terrorist atrocities. I have long believed that the single largest contribution that mainstream journalists could make to the cause of peace in the Middle East is to stop describing actions taken by either Israelis or Palestinians using the phrase “in response to”, or “in retaliation for”.
Consider the following imaginary report:
Today, Israeli forces launched rocket attacks against targets in the West Bank, killing 12 adults and 3 children and injuring 20, in response to incursions by Palestinian gunmen into Israeli settlements.
Contrast this with:
Today, Israeli forces launched rocket attacks against targets in the West Bank, killing 12 adults and 3 children and injuring 20.
Likewise, compare the following two imaginary reports:
Palestinian dissidents opened fire on a group of Israeli troops in the Gaza strip, killing 10 soldiers and wounding a 12-year old girl caught in the crossfire, in an attack they said was in retaliation for Israel’s recent assassination of a leading Palestinian figure.
or…
Palestinian dissidents opened fire on a group of Israeli troops in the Gaza strip, killing 10 soldiers and wounding a 12-year old girl.
My point is that I believe every time we hear a news report linking some death to some other event in the region, we are encouraged to abstract away the actual human death in favour of some connect-the-dots picture of who did what to whom. I believe we are encouraged to justify murder by describing it as being “in response to”, or “in retaliation for”.
I wonder how public opinion might be impacted if we simply heard on the television or radio:
Today, Israelis killed 12 Palestinians.
Today, Palestinians killed 14 Israelis.
No “in connection with”, no historical narrative — just cold, clinical, death.
Again, I do not support the UK government’s urge to eliminate open public discussion that might lead in the direction of ‘justifying’ terrorism. But what I would support — wholeheartedly — would be a move by mainstream journalists to stop offering bite-sized connect-the-dots claims about why more people have been murdered, and just report the facts. If journalists would like to give real historical accounts, in all their complexity, of the interrelationships between events, then that’s great — but I personally believe these explanations of the bite-size spoonful variety do little more than to push the realities of death to an intellectual arm’s length away.
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Other articles by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor
This article was last reviewed by on Tuesday, 22nd November 2005. You can leave a response below.
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http://counsellingresource.com/features/2005/11/22/justifying-terrorism/
12th December 2007
Excellent article.
15th March 2008
I agree with you absolutely..