Was Fort Hood terrorism?
The New York Times’ news blog, The Lede, has an interesting post on the Senate hearings probing the connection between terrorism and the Fort Hood shootings. Given that the definition of terrorism is traditionally limited to attacks on noncombatants but that many people want to call the Foot Hood shootings terrorism, The Lede inquires whether an attack on troops can ever be called terrorism.
Plenty of space is given to a 2004 book by and 2006 interview with political philosopher (and sometimes public philosopher) Michael Walzer, the most prominent contemporary thinker on just war theory. Walzer has defined terrorism as “the deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, in order to spread fear through a whole population” with some intended political effect. Walzer sticks pretty hard to the noncombatant part of this definition: he argues, for example, that, besides the innocent civilians taken hostage on American Flight 77, the Pentagon part of the 9/11 attacks was not terrorism, since those killed in the Pentagon were soldiers or civilians actively supporting soldiers. Walzer concludes: “attacks on soldiers are not terrorist attacks”, though he is clear that this “does not make them right; terrorism is not the only negative moral term in our vocabulary.”
So what do you think? Can attacks on soldiers be called terrorism? Does it matter if the Fort Hood attacks were technically terrorism or not? Does this definition of terrorism impede our ability to investigate and prevent attacks by violent extremists (whoever they are against)?
-Marc
Related posts:
- Fort Hood and the Media
- It’s hard to be a saint in the (war-torn) city
- Tea parties and terrorism
- Iran and just revolution
- Controlling the uncontrollable
ShareComments
One Response to “Was Fort Hood terrorism?”
Leave a Reply
I think these discussions show how obsessed we are with highly emotive semantics, and how much we rely on labels to “do our thinking for us.” Walzer’s reasoning makes sense to me, but I think terrorism is a very problematic concept to begin with. The most important question we should ask ourselves when thinking about these terms is whether we can also be seen by the other side as guilty. When we kill the entire family of an Al Qaeda leader as collateral damage, what should that be called?