Released November 14, 2001 

Terrorism: Theirs and Ours
by Eqbal Ahmad 

A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12, 1998 
From: http://www.twf.org/News/Y2001/1114-Terrorism.html

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described as 
"TERRORIST." Then new things happened. 

By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with 
the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the 
terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be 
described, by 1944-45, as "freedom fighters." At least two Israeli Prime 
Ministers, including Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the 
books and posters with their pictures, saying "Terrorists, Reward This 
Much." The highest reward I have noted so far was 100,000 British pounds on 
the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist. 

Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, 
occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has 
been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, William 
Safire of the New York Times, as the "Chief of Terrorism." That's Yasir 
Arafat. 

Now, on September 29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of Yasir 
Arafat to the right of President Bill Clinton. To his left is Israeli Prime 
Minister Benjamin Netan-yahu. Clinton is looking towards Arafat and Arafat 
is looking literally like a meek mouse. Just a few years earlier he used to 
appear with this very menacing look around him, with a gun appearing 
menacing from his belt. You remember those pictures, and you remember the 
next one. 

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. These 
bearded men I was writing about in those days in The New Yorker, actually 
did. They were very ferocious-looking bearded men with turbans looking like 
they came from another century. President Reagan received them in the White 
House. After receiving them he spoke to the press. He pointed towards them, 
I'm sure some of you will recall that moment, and said, "These are the moral 
equivalent of America's founding fathers". These were the Afghan Mujahiddin. 
They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the Evil Empire. They were the 
moral equivalent of our founding fathers! 

In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes from the 
American navy based in the Indian Ocean to kill Osama Bin Laden and his men 
in the camps in Afghanistan. I do not wish to embarrass you with the 
reminder that Mr. Bin Laden, whom fifteen American missiles were fired to 
hit in Afghanistan, was only a few years ago the moral equivalent of George 
Washington and Thomas Jefferson! He got angry over the fact that he has been 
demoted from 'Moral Equivalent' of your 'Founding Fathers'. So he is taking 
out his anger in different ways. I'll come back to that subject more 
seriously in a moment. 

You see, why I have recalled all these stories is to point out to you that 
the matter of terrorism is rather complicated. Terrorists change. The 
terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday 
becomes the terrorist of today. This is a serious matter of the constantly 
changing world of images in which we have to keep our heads straight to know 
what is terrorism and what is not. But more importantly, to know what causes 
it, and how to stop it. 

The next point about our terrorism is that posture of inconsistency 
necessarily evades definition. If you are not going to be consistent, you're 
not going to define. I have examined at least twenty official documents on 
terrorism. Not one defines the word. All of them explain it, express it 
emotively, polemically, to arouse our emotions rather than exercise our 
intelligence. I give you only one example, which is representative. October 
25, 1984. George Shultz, then Secretary of State of the U.S., is speaking at 
the New York Park Avenue Synagogue. It's a long speech on terrorism. In the 
State Department Bulletin of seven single-spaced pages, there is not a 
single definition of terrorism. What we get is the following: 

Definition number one: "Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call 
terrorism." 

Definition number two is even more brilliant: "Terrorism is a form of 
political violence." Aren't you surprised? It is a form of political 
violence, says George Shultz, Secretary of State of the U.S. 

Number three: "Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization." 

Number four: "Terrorism is a menace to Western moral values." 

Did you notice, does it tell you anything other than arouse your emotions? 
This is typical. They don't define terrorism because definitions involve a 
commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of 
consistency. That's the second characteristic of the official literature on 
terrorism. 

The third characteristic is that the absence of definition does not prevent 
officials from being globalistic. We may not define terrorism, but it is a 
menace to the moral values of Western civilization. It is a menace also to 
mankind. It's a menace to good order. Therefore, you must stamp it out 
worldwide. Our reach has to be global. You need a global reach to kill it. 
Anti-terrorist policies therefore have to be global. Same speech of George 
Shultz: "There is no question about our ability to use force where and when 
it is needed to counter terrorism." There is no geographical limit. On a 
single day the missiles hit Afghanistan and Sudan. Those two countries are 
2,300 miles apart, and they were hit by missiles belonging to a country 
roughly 8,000 miles away. Reach is global. 

A fourth characteristic: claims of power are not only globalist they are 
also omniscient. We know where they are; therefore we know where to hit. We 
have the means to know. We have the instruments of knowledge. We are 
omniscient. Shultz: "We know the difference between terrorists and freedom 
fighters, and as we look around, we have no trouble telling one from the 
other." 

Only Osama Bin Laden doesn't know that he was an ally one day and an enemy 
another. That's very confusing for Osama Bin Laden. I'll come back to his 
story towards the end. It's a real story. 

Five. The official approach eschews causation. You don't look at causes of 
anybody becoming terrorist. Cause? What cause? They ask us to be looking, to 
be sympathetic to these people. 

Another example. The New York Times, December 18, 1985, reported that the 
foreign minister of Yugoslavia, you remember the days when there was a 
Yugoslavia, requested the Secretary of State of the U.S. to consider the 
causes of Palestinian terrorism. The Secretary of State, George Shultz, and 
I am quoting from the New York Times, "went a bit red in the face. He 
pounded the table and told the visiting foreign minister, there is no 
connection with any cause. Period." Why look for causes? 

Number six. The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is 
selective. We are to feel the terror of those groups, which are officially 
disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of those groups of whom officials 
do approve. Hence, President Reagan, "I am a contra." He actually said that. 
We know the contras of Nicaragua were anything, by any definition, but 
terrorists. The media, to move away from the officials, heed the dominant 
view of terrorism. 

The dominant approach also excludes from consideration, more importantly to 
me, the terror of friendly governments. To that question I will return 
because it excused among others the terror of Pinochet (who killed one of my 
closest friends) and Orlando Letelier; and it excused the terror of Zia 
ul-Haq, who killed many of my friends in Pakistan. All I want to tell you is 
that according to my ignorant calculations, the ratio of people killed by 
the state terror of Zia ul-Haq, Pino-chet, Argentinian, Brazilian, 
Indonesian type, versus the killing of the PLO and other terrorist types is 
literally, conservatively, one to one hundred thousand. That's the ratio. 

History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power and not to 
weakness. Therefore, visibility has been accorded historically to dominant 
groups. In our time, the time that began with this day, Columbus Day.Ê 

The time that begins with Columbus Day is a time of extraordinary unrecorded 
holocausts. Great civilizations have been wiped out. The Mayas, the Incas, 
the Aztecs, the American Indians, the Canadian Indians were all wiped out. 
Their voices have not been heard, even to this day fully. Now they are 
beginning to be heard, but not fully. They are heard, yes, but only when the 
dominant power suffers, only when resistance has a semblance of costing, of 
exacting a price. When a Custer is killed or when a Gordon is besieged. 
That's when you know that they were Indians fighting, Arabs fighting and 
dying. 

My last point of this section Ð U.S. policy in the Cold War period has 
sponsored terrorist regimes one after another. Somoza, Batista, all kinds of 
tyrants have been America's friends. You know that. There was a reason for 
that. I or you are not guilty. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan, mujahiddin. 
El Salvador, etc. 

Now the second side. You've suffered enough. So suffer more. 

There ain't much good on the other side either. You shouldn't imagine that I 
have come to praise the other side. But keep the balance in mind. Keep the 
imbalance in mind and first ask ourselves, What is terrorism? 

Our first job should be to define the damn thing, name it, give it a 
description of some kind, other than "moral equivalent of founding fathers" 
or "a moral outrage to Western civilization". I will stay with you with 
Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: "Terror is an intense, overpowering fear." 
He uses terrorizing, terrorism, "the use of terrorizing methods of governing 
or resisting a government." This simple definition has one great virtue, 
that of fairness. It's fair. It focuses on the use of coercive violence, 
violence that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce. And this 
definition is correct because it treats terror for what it is, whether the 
government or private people commit it. 

Have you noticed something? Motivation is left out of it. We're not talking 
about whether the cause is just or unjust. We're talking about consensus, 
consent, absence of consent, legality, absence of legality, 
constitutionality, absence of constitutionality. Why do we keep motives out? 
Because motives differ. Motives differ and make no difference. 

I have identified in my work five types of terrorism.Ê 

First, state terrorism. Second, religious terrorism; terrorism inspired by 
religion, Catholics killing Protestants, Sunnis killing Shiites, Shiites 
killing Sunnis, God, religion, sacred terror, you can call it if you wish. 
State, church. Crime. Mafia. All kinds of crimes commit terror. There is 
pathology. You're pathological. You're sick. You want the attention of the 
whole world. You've got to kill a president. You will. You terrorize. You 
hold up a bus. Fifth, there is political terror of the private group; be 
they Indian, Vietnamese, Algerian, Palestinian, Baader-Meinhof, the Red 
Brigade. Political terror of the private group. Oppositional terror.Ê 

Keep these five in mind. Keep in mind one more thing. Sometimes these five 
can converge on each other. You start with protest terror. You go crazy. You 
become pathological. You continue. They converge. State terror can take the 
form of private terror. For example, we're all familiar with the death 
squads in Latin America or in Pakistan. Government has employed private 
people to kill its opponents. It's not quite official. It's privatized. 
Convergence. Or the political terrorist who goes crazy and becomes 
pathological. Or the criminal who joins politics. In Afghanistan, in Central 
America, the CIA employed in its covert operations drug pushers. Drugs and 
guns often go together. Smuggling of all things often go together. 

Of the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the least important 
in terms of cost to human lives and human property [Political Terror of 
those who want to be heard]. The highest cost is state terror. The second 
highest cost is religious terror, although in the twentieth century 
religious terror has, relatively speaking, declined. If you are looking 
historically, massive costs. The next highest cost is crime. Next highest, 
pathology. A Rand Corporation study by Brian Jenkins, for a ten-year period 
up to 1988, showed 50% of terror was committed without any political cause 
at all. No politics. Simply crime and pathology.Ê 

So the focus is on only one, the political terrorist, the PLO, the Bin 
Laden, whoever you want to take. Why do they do it? What makes the terrorist 
tick? 

I would like to knock them out quickly to you. First, the need to be heard. 
Imagine, we are dealing with a minority group, the political, private 
terrorist. First, the need to be heard. Normally, and there are exceptions, 
there is an effort to be heard, to get your grievances heard by people. 
They're not hearing it. A minority acts. The majority applauds. 

The Palestinians, for example, the superterrorists of our time, were 
dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to 1968 they went to every court in the 
world. They knocked at every door in the world. They were told that they 
became dispossessed because some radio told them to go away - an Arab radio, 
which was a lie. Nobody was listening to the truth. Finally, they invented a 
new form of terror, literally their invention: the airplane hijacking. 
Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled the world up by its ears. They dragged us 
out and said, Listen, Listen. We listened. We still haven't done them 
justice, but at least we all know. Even the Israelis acknowledge. Remember 
Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, saying in 1970, 'There are no 
Palestinians.' They do not exist. They damn well exist now. We are cheating 
them at Oslo. At least there are some people to cheat now. We can't just 
push them out. The need to be heard is essential. One motivation there. 

Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to strike out. You are angry. 
You are feeling helpless. You want retribution. You want to wreak 
retributive justice. The experience of violence by a stronger party has 
historically turned victims into terrorists. Battered children are known to 
become abusive parents and violent adults. You know that. That's what 
happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State 
terror very often breeds collective terror. 

Do you recall the fact that the Jews were never terrorists? By and large 
Jews were not known to commit terror except during and after the Holocaust. 
Most studies show that the majority of members of the worst terrorist groups 
in Israel or in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs, were people who 
were immigrants from the most anti-Semitic countries of Eastern Europe and 
Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the Palestinians from 
the refugee camps are battered people. They become very violent. The ghettos 
are violent internally. They become violent externally when there is a 
clear, identifiable external target, an enemy where you can say, 'Yes, this 
one did it to me'. Then they can strike back. 

Example is a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized 
Beirut hijacking of the TWA plane. After that hijacking, there were 
hijacking attempts at nine different American airports. Pathological groups 
or individuals modeling on the others. Even more serious are examples set by 
governments. When governments engage in terror, they set very large 
examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they engage in other sets 
of examples. 

Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim terrorism. 
Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror. Those of you who are 
familiar with revolutionary theory know the debates, the disputes, the 
quarrels, the fights within revolutionary groups of Europe, the fight 
between anarchists and Marxists, for example. But the Marxists have always 
argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be sociologically 
and psychologically selective. Don't hijack a plane. Don't hold hostages. 
Don't kill children, for God's sake. Have you recalled also that the great 
revolutions, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Algerian, the Cuban, never 
engaged in hijacking type of terrorism? They did engage in terrorism, but it 
was highly selective, highly sociological, still deplorable, but there was 
an organized, highly limited, selective character to it. So absence of 
revolutionary ideology that begins more or less in the post-World War II 
period has been central to this phenomenon. 

My final question is - These conditions have existed for a long time. But 
why then this flurry of private political terrorism? Why now so much of it 
and so visible? The answer is modern technology. You have a cause. You can 
communicate it through radio and television. They will all come swarming if 
you have taken an aircraft and are holding 150 Americans hostage. They will 
all hear your cause. You have a modern weapon through which you can shoot a 
mile away. They can't reach you. And you have the modern means of 
communicating. When you put together the cause, the instrument of coercion 
and the instrument of communication, politics is made. A new kind of 
politics becomes possible. 

To this challenge rulers from one country after another have been responding 
with traditional methods. The traditional method of shooting it out, whether 
it's missiles or some other means. The Israelis are very proud of it. The 
Americans are very proud of it. The French became very proud of it. Now the 
Pakistanis are very proud of it. The Pakistanis say, 'Our commandos are the 
best.' Frankly, it won't work. A central problem of our time, political 
minds, rooted in the past, and modern times, producing new realities. 
Therefore in conclusion, what is my recommendation to America? 

Quickly. First, avoid extremes of double standards. If you're going to 
practice double standards, you will be paid with double standards. Don't use 
it. Don't condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror, El 
Salvadoran terror, on the one hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or 
Palestinian terror. It doesn't work. Try to be even-handed. A superpower 
cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage 
terrorism in another place. It won't work in this shrunken world. 

Do not condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them. Fight them. Punish 
them. Please eschew, avoid covert operations and low-intensity warfare. 
These are breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and drugs are bred 
there. The structure of covert operations, I've made a film about it, which 
has been very popular in Europe, called Dealing with the Demon. I have shown 
that wherever covert operations have been, there has been the central drug 
problem. That has been also the center of the drug trade. Because the 
structure of covert operations, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Central 
America, is very hospitable to drug trade. Avoid it. Give it up. It doesn't 
help. 

Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes. Try to look at causes and 
solve problems. Do not concentrate on military solutions. Do not seek 
military solutions. Terrorism is a political problem. Seek political 
solutions. Diplomacy works. 

Take the example of the last attack on Bin Laden. You don't know what you're 
attacking. They say they know, but they don't know. They were trying to kill 
Qadaffi. They killed his four-year-old daughter. The poor baby hadn't done 
anything. Qadaffi is still alive. They tried to kill Saddam Hussein. They 
killed Laila Bin Attar, a prominent artist, an innocent woman. They tried to 
kill Bin Laden and his men. Not one but twenty-five other people died. They 
tried to destroy a chemical factory in Sudan. Now they are admitting that 
they destroyed an innocent factory, one-half of the production of medicine 
in Sudan has been destroyed, not a chemical factory. You don't know. You 
think you know. 

Four of your missiles fell in Pakistan. One was slightly damaged. Two were 
totally damaged. One was totally intact. For ten years the American 
government has kept an embargo on Pakistan because Pakistan is trying, 
stupidly, to build nuclear weapons and missiles. So we have a technology 
embargo on my country. One of the missiles was intact. What do you think a 
Pakistani official told the Washington Post? He said it was a gift from 
Allah. We wanted U.S. technology. Now we have got the technology, and our 
scientists are examining this missile very carefully. It fell into the wrong 
hands. So don't do that. Look for political solutions. Do not look for 
military solutions. They cause more problems than they solve. 

Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international law. There 
was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn't they go to it first to get their 
warrant against Bin Laden, if they have some evidence? Get a warrant, then 
go after him. Internationally. Enforce the U.N. Enforce the International 
Court of Justice, this unilateralism makes us look very stupid and them 
relatively smaller. 

Q&A 

The question here is that I mentioned that I would go somewhat into the 
story of Bin Laden, the Saudi in Afghanistan and didn't do so, could I go 
into some detail? The point about Bin Laden would be roughly the same as the 
point between Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was accused and convicted of 
encouraging the blowing up of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 
New Yorker did a long story on him. It's the same as that of Aimal Kansi, 
the Pakistani Baluch who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA agents. 
Let me see if I can be very short on this. Jihad, which has been translated 
a thousand times as "holy war," is not quite just that. Jihad is an Arabic 
word that means, "to struggle." It could be struggle by violence or struggle 
by non-violent means. There are two forms, the small jihad and the big 
jihad. The small jihad involves violence. The big jihad involves the 
struggles with self. Those are the concepts. The reason I mention it is that 
in Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had 
disappeared in the last four hundred years, for all practical purposes. It 
was revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union 
intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan, 
which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity and launched a jihad there 
against godless communism.Ê The U.S. saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize 
one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the Evil Empire. Money 
started pouring in. CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world 
recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the 
early prize recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was 
not only a Saudi. He was also a multimillionaire, willing to put his own 
money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the jihad 
against communism. 

I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official of 
whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I was talking to him 
and said, 'Who are the Arabs here who would be very interesting?' By here I 
meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said, 'You must meet Osama.' I went to 
see Osama. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria, from 
Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman. This fellow was an ally. 
He remained an ally. He turns at a particular moment. In 1990 the U.S. goes 
into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the holy place of Muslims, 
Mecca and Medina. There had never been foreign troops there. In 1990, during 
the Gulf War, they went in, in the name of helping Saudi Arabia defeat 
Saddam Hussein. Osama Bin Laden remained quiet. Saddam was defeated, but the 
American troops stayed on in the land of the kaba (the sacred site of Islam 
in Mecca), foreign troops. He wrote letter after letter saying, Why are you 
here? Get out! You came to help but you have stayed on. Finally he started a 
jihad against the other occupiers. His mission is to get American troops out 
of Saudi Arabia. His earlier mission was to get Russian troops out of 
Afghanistan. See what I was saying earlier about covert operations? 

A second point to be made about him is these are tribal people, people who 
are really tribal. Being a millionaire doesn't matter. Their code of ethics 
is tribal. The tribal code of ethics consists of two words: loyalty and 
revenge. You are my friend. You keep your word. I am loyal to you. You break 
your word, I go on my path of revenge. For him, America has broken its word. 
The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood loyalty has 
betrayed you. They're going to go for you. They're going to do a lot more. 

These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost. This is 
why I said to stop covert operations. There is a price attached to those 
that the American people cannot calculate and Kissinger type of people do 
not know, don't have the history to know. 


Courtesy: University of Colorado. Eqbal Ahmad, Professor Emeritus of 
International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies at Hampshire College in 
Amherst, Massachusetts, also served as a managing editor of the quarterly 
Race and Class. A prolific writer, his articles and essays have been 
published in The Nation, Dawn (Pakistan), among several other journals 
throughout the world. He died in 1999.