Three Easy Steps
By Adrian Calamel
The final semester of graduate school with a master’s thesis on Hezbollah completed my primary reader abruptly retired with the history department choosing a replacement, someone who would have been my last choice. After reading through 150-pages and some superficial editing, called me into his office and told me to “remove every mention of terrorism or terrorist, it is a polemic and cannot be defined.” The shock wore off in roughly ten-seconds and told the professor, “I can define it in thirty-seconds.”
- Terrorism is a political act to force demands on a government or community.
- Victims of terrorism are innocent civilians, indiscriminately targeted.
- The audience, viewers and readers, are the people being terrorized. Could they be next?
I was never given the thirty-seconds to provide the definition, an easy litmus test to determine if someone is a terrorist, an organization qualifies as a terrorist organization, and if an “event” should be considered a terrorist attack. Instead of removing every mention of terrorism which would have gutted my entire thesis, I spent an additional six months in graduate school crafting another thesis. A few years later while teaching a course on terrorism in college a sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me when cornered in an office with the department head. When an “academic” resembling Karl Marx with a sociology degree approaches a terrorism scholar the conversation is beyond predictable.
After exchanging pleasantries, the department head did not waste any time and quickly asked about the terrorism course, specifically how can it be defined? With ease and in under thirty-seconds, but someone was clearly not listening when he followed up with the cynical and tired false narrative, “then couldn’t you call the American revolutionaries terrorists?” It was at that point I restated the three-points and asked whether the American revolutionaries deliberately and systematically attacked civilians or British soldiers, the obvious answer made him acquiesce, but still looking unconvinced. Without a degree being dangled over my head I was finally able to let history and facts soundly defeat hyperbole from a sociologist without ramifications. With only five minutes to spare before standing in front of forty students, the department head received a lesson in history covering three centuries of warfare and terrorism, uncomfortable truths for someone who viewed terrorists as freedom fighters when it fit his political sensibilities.
Terror and Reign of Terror were terms borne out of the French Revolution when the guillotine was introduced as the first state instrument of terror to bend the political will of the people with 35,000 – 45,000 public executions for nine-murderous months beginning in 1793. The irony would have probably been lost so it remained unsaid, the term terror did not appear until a decade after the American Revolution. France eventually stabilized under Napoleon’s rule, but after securing the Revolution at home he exported it abroad with by invading countries, installing his siblings as leaders and forcing the Napoleonic code or French law on the people. The British learned a very painful but important lesson in their defeat to the American Minutemen, hit and run tactics known as guerilla warfare was extremely effective for an inferior force pitted against the world’s most powerful enemy. Napoleon’s planned invasion of Portugal never materialized, and France was forced to commit over 200,000 troops to maintain control of Spain during the Peninsular Wars. In short, the British with roughly 15,000 troops working alongside Portuguese and Spanish partisans employed guerilla tactics learned in America making Portugal an impossibility for the French with a quarter of a million troops. The Duke of Wellington would cause headaches for Napoleon in Spain before meeting him face-to-face on the battlefield at Waterloo, inferior numbers using guerilla tactics kept Europe’s most powerful land army off balance. Civilians were not targeted; the French military was targeted, not terrorism. To really drive home my point, I turned to a conflict that would hopefully have him questioning his own views about who the actual terrorists in Vietnam were.
When someone detonates a bomb in a crowding civilian setting are they targeting the military or the population? When the Viet Cong were setting of bombs in the cafes, bars, restaurants and shops of Saigon were innocent civilians killed? Was there a political objective for the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh when civilians were targeted in waves of bombings? Putting on a set of black pajamas and using irregular warfare does not make a person or organization a terrorist, however deliberately killing civilians so their families will abandon the country and/or pressure the government into cede the country is the very definition of terrorism and it should not be difficult to see.
Surveying the globe today an easy argument can be made the Islamic regime occupying Iran issued in a Reign of Terror beginning in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini grabbed power. Stalin’s Reign of Terror has been reduced to 1936-1938 one purge, but all thirty-years of his rule were a reign of terror if living inside the Soviet fear state. The same may be said for all forty-five-years under the Khomeinist doctrine with no break under his successor Khamenei; public hangings, chemical attacks on schoolgirls, rape, torture, blinding of innocent Iranians all on display over the last several years. Terrorize the population into submission using a monopoly on violence. Outside its boundaries the Islamic regime utilizes terror or the threat of terrorism to further its objectives, often relying on their creation Hezbollah to collapse a building or carry out an assassination. In 1994 Argentina cancelled a nuclear cooperation pact with Khamenei after pressure from the United States and Israel, then June of the same year an Israeli airstrike deep into Lebanon eliminated Hezbollah terrorists. The world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and its premier proxy’s interests converged when a Hezbollah suicide bomber drove a truck into the Jewish cultural center (AMIA) July 1994 in Buenos Aires and detonated the payload. A terrorist act which killed eighty-five innocent civilians and injured over three hundred. Khamenei sent a political message to Israel and Argentina vis-à-vis the nuclear deal while striking fear into one of the largest Jewish communities outside of Israel. A Hezbollah bomber obscured the true motive and terrorism apologists called it an act of revenge for the targeted strike on a terror training camp in Lebanon where no civilians were killed.
Memorize the three-point litmus test above, terrorism cannot be defeated if it cannot be defined.
Iranians Blinded by Regime Terror
No responses yet