When you open up a dictionary and read a definition, you think of it as the gospel: perfectly correct and immutable. But words are more nebulous than that; they ebb and change over time depending upon how people use them. Terrorism is a poster-child of this trend.
In 2005, a United Nations Secretary General report defined it as an action “intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.” Although the UN provides this nice formal definition, to develop a fuller notion of terrorism, further investigation is necessary.
In our minds, the “terrorist” is an objectively evil person who stands in opposition to the American Way. This puts us on the moral high ground, a rather precarious place to be. By painting the “terrorist” as categorically bad, we eliminate further nuance and empathy in our analysis.
The act of naming a terrorist is similar to beet juice staining everything on the dinner plate. This metaphor illustrates that any ideologies or ethnic groups associated with the specific terrorist sect become equally tainted. Muslims all over the globe deal with this daily. They are painted as the ‘Other’ motivated simply by a violent religious philosophy and a hatred of America. This is not just unfair to call all Muslims terrorists, it’s bigotry.
When Dylann Roof killed nine innocent people in the name of racism, still media outlets were reluctant to label him a terrorist. When you search “What does terrorism mean?” in Google, the definition that is spit back at you is “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” So why are news outlets hesitant to label Roof as a terrorist when he so completely fits a mold? It seems that we tend to reject the notion that terrorists can be homegrown — a notion that reeks of xenophobia. We are slow to label fellow (white) Americans as terrorists and jump at the opportunity to throw the term at those we consider ‘Other.’
Perhaps the most elegant working definition of terrorism comes from The Oxford English Dictionary (third ed.): “at its simplest [terrorism is] any act designed to cause terror” — even while we insist that it means whatever we want it to.
