Who Is a Terrorist? A Lesson in Semantics

“Terrorist” is among the scariest words in the English language, usually reserved for individual shooters or small bands of radical bomb-throwers. But today its definition depends on who uses the word and how they use it.

Noam Chomsky wrote that “The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.”

When it comes to raining blockbuster bombs down on tall apartment buildings, killing hundreds of families huddled in their bedrooms, few American politicians call that terrorism. Instead, it’s described on TV as standing up for civilized values. Those who actually launch the murderous bombs are honored as statesmen and patriots, but they are in fact terrorists.

On July 19, in a shameful display of naked partisanship, that is exactly what happened in Washington, DC. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man under indictment in his own country and now an internationally indicted war criminal, spoke to rousing cheers by almost the entire US House and Senate.

Are we so bereft of humanity and so lacking in compassion that we celebrate such barbarism? Who does that?

However, the recent International Criminal Court charges are serious, and cannot be ignored. They include intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population; murder, extermination of masses of people, and starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; plus other crimes.

British war correspondent Robert Fisk pointed out in the film Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth (2019) that by “changing words and downgrading language when reporting on Gaza — a war of attrition that remains entrenched in colonialism, land theft, and human rights violations — the situation is effectively transformed into something that bears no resemblance to reality.”

Otto Friedrich published a celebrated essay in Time Magazine in 1984 titled, “Of Words That Ravage, Pillage, Spoil.” Words themselves, he explained, are weapons that can kill. Political elocution, while apparently as neat and clean as the napkins at a tea party, can deliver blood and gore when translated into action. Among other examples, he wrote, President Reagan renamed the deadly MX missile, each carrying a dozen 300-350 megaton warheads that could devastate entire cities, “The Peacekeeper.”

Everybody agrees that killing women and children by the tens of thousands is inhumane. So why has the supposedly enlightened, civilized, estimable, suit-and-tied members of the world’s greatest deliberative body, the US Congress, cheered so enthusiastically for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, already indicted for mass murder?

Is politics in America so corrupt and cynical that Netanyahu, the thuggish Likud Mafioso now in control in the Holy Land, gets repeated standing ovations from the representatives of small town America? They are supposed to work for us, but have instead defiled the flag that flies over the capitol dome.

Historians know that it is these repeated scenes of wild, thoughtless enthusiasm disguised as patriotism that bring about wider conflicts with devastating consequences. If you need a reminder, read Gone With the Wind, or go see the movie again. Often the so-called “true patriots” are really unthinking zealots.

Who, then, is a terrorist? The Hamas chieftain Yahya Sinwar is certainly one. Found guilty by the International Criminal Court for launching the attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel on a single day in October, 2023, his fate awaits. That action was clearly a crime against humanity, as the ICC has ruled.

The court also indicted at the same time the smarmy and duplicitous Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has presided over nearly ten months of continuous killing of innocent civilians in Gaza, causing at least 40,000 deaths—two-thirds of them women and children. The carnage against civilians in Gaza is still going on today, with no military solution in sight as Netanyahu’s own generals have told him.

He lied repeatedly about Israel’s genocidal attacks on the civilian population, with no explanation as to why ten months into the campaign against the tiny enclave, the bombs keep falling, killing scores of civilians every day, wiping out entire families with nothing to show but acres of rubble, dozens of corpses and wrecked bodies of children without arms or legs. Yet the murderous attacks continue.

Netanyahu stood before Congress with the whole world watching and said that Israel has facilitated humanitarian aid into Gaza, while the UN Secretary General and every aid organization has refuted that claim.

Are we so bereft of humanity and so lacking in compassion that we celebrate such barbarism? Who does that? The answer is that the U.S. Congress does—most of whose members have officially participated in this genocide by voting to send money and arms to Israel, and by wildly applauding its chief perpetrator.

The members of Congress represent us. As American citizens, we are therefore forced to share in the responsibility for the ongoing bloodshed, and—painfully and truthfully—for the murder of tens of thousands of innocent people.

Senator, Congressman or Congresswoman, whoever you are, know this—if you endorsed the continuous killing in Gaza month after month, and wildly applauded the perpetrator, the blood guilt belongs to you. History will not forget. We, the voters, know who you are, and we will not forget.

Who then is a terrorist? Look in the mirror. We are. Unless we separate ourselves from official Washington by rejecting US support for the Gaza massacre, that label belongs to all of us.