Citation

Harmon CC, Inouye DK. CTX: Combat. Terror. Exch. 2016; 6(3): e62.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Naval Postgraduate School, Global ECCO (Education Community Collaboration Online))

DOI

unavailable

PMID

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Abstract

Some social scientists and theorists believe the use of the word terrorism reflects only the prejudices and self-interested opinions of "establishment" elites and Westerners. But Bourti is a proud terrorist who offered the opinions quoted above to an Algerian journalist, whom he mistook for an ally. Everything he said confirms the profound seriousness of the ideas behind terrorist acts and the global fight against international terrorism. Within one generation, our world has seen millennium bomb plots; the 9/11 attacks; devastating bombings in Ankara, Bali, and Casablanca; well-sequenced multiple explosions on transit systems in Britain and Spain; and "complex attacks" in which infantry tactics were used against the innocent in public places such as Mumbai, or were combined with improvised explosive devices, as is frequently done in Iraq.

The calculation required to accomplish all such killings is sometimes openly betrayed in the speech that frames terrorists' assaults. Terrorists' own words belie the pious excuses they typically offer for their actions. Yet hardly anyone who is studying the phenomenon of twenty-first-century terrorism has noticed this disjunction.4 Even many scholars commonly repeat the dismissive cliché that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Certain terrorism analysts think it's a safe assertion that no sub-state actor would ever accept the label terrorist for himself. But some of these actors embrace the label, and we should recognize that their admissions are important.

Fourteen issues of the al Qaeda magazine Inspire appeared between 2010 and 2015, offering readers insight into the organization's purposes and strategies. Inspire's editors flagrantly deploy the very words (terrorist and terrorism) that some mainstream English-language media outlets discourage or forbid their own writers from using, to avoid inflaming readers.

Language: en