Against Amnesia
The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror.
–Eqbal Ahmed, 1998
[Ahmed though does not explicitly include the state terrorism of Western states. He merely talks about the how US ‘promotes terrorism’, for instance.]
From a transcript of a talk by Eqbal Ahmed
University of Colorado, Boulder, on 12 October 1998
“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.'
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.'
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. He pointed towards them 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’.”
For Reagan and Thatcher, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.
“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 contra. He actually said that.
The dominant approach also excludes from consideration the terror of friendly governments. It excused among others the terror of Pinochet in Chile and it excused the terror of Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan.
the ratio of people killed by the state terror of Zia ul-Haq, Pinochet, Argentinean, Brazilian, Indonesian type, versus the killing of the PLO and other terrorist types is literally, conservatively, one to one hundred thousand.
US policy in the Cold War period has sponsored terrorist regimes one after another. Somoza, Batista, all kinds of tyrants have been America's friends. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan, Mujahiddin. El Salvador, etc.”
What is terrorism:
“Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: 'Terror is an intense, overpowering fear.' Terrorism is ‘the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government.' This simple definition has one great virtue, that of fairness. It's air. 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.
The need to be heard is essential. One motivation there.
The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror.
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.
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.
Cover operations and low-intensity warfare are breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and drugs are bred there.
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.
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. The US 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.
Bin Laden’s mission was 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?
For Bin Laden, America has broken its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood loyalty has betrayed you.” (Eqbal Ahmed, October 1998)
Then came 2001.
“A feature of the Western ‘war on terror’ that seems to come out of fable rather than reality is an inability to see the enemy. In fact, it is an inability to define the enemy. In the Sahel, the French state has settled on ‘Islamist terrorists’, a sequence of adjectives that denote elusive subjects surging out of horizons of pure violence. The inability is compounded by the fact that terrorists must be picked out in terrains unknowable to the West, because the West has long considered them—still considers them—to be outside of history: Afghanistan, a redoubt against empires, those makers of history; the Sahel, a land somewhere in the continent that Hegel banished from history.” (Rahmane Idrissa, 2021)
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