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I Say “Terrorist”, You Say Whatever

Jimmie | December 14, 2008 | Comments (0)

Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the New York Times, has an interesting article in his paper today on the agonies of using the word “terrorist” to describe…well…terrorists.

The Mumbai terror attacks posed a familiar semantic issue for Times editors: what to call people who pursue political, religious, territorial, or unidentifiable goals through violence on civilians.

Gosh that’s a head scratcher, isn’t it? If only we could somehow consult one of those books that tells us what words mean. What do you call those. A word-definition looker-upper? A defineulator? A Definition-O-Matic? It’s such a difficult semantic issue to find the right word to call a book containing words and their definitions.

Many readers want the newspaper, even on the news pages, to share their moral outrage — or their political views — by adopting the word terrorist, with all its connotations of opprobrium. What you call someone matters. If he is a terrorist, he is an enemy of all civilized people, and his cause is less worthy of consideration.

No. What most people want is for newspaper editorial staffs to stop twisting themselves into Möbius Strips of moral relativism just to keep themselves from using the one word that fits best. What “many readers” want is for newspapers to stop treating them like morons with bad impulse control. Seven years ago, the MSM self-imposed a boycott on 9/11 images because the outlets believes that we Americans would go on an orgy of violence against the helpless Muslims. That was a silly and insulting decision and so is the MSM’s current hand-wringing over what we poor benighted fools will do with the word “terrorist”.

The truth of the matter is that anything the newspaper does can be seen as a political act and Hoyt darned well knows it. This is the same newspaper, remember, that printed the baseless Al Qaa Qaa story on the eve of the 2004 election. It’s also the same newspaper that ran with a pretty scandalous profile of Cindy McCain then turned around and put out a puff piece on Michelle Obama not long thereafter.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that people might just have a point when they wonder why the Times will take an explicitly political stance on two Presidential races but not on what to call the purposeful killing of innocent civilians. When they see the MSM knocking itself out looking for anything else to call terrorists but terrorists, what other conclusion can they reasonably draw but that the MSM is covering for them? The Times can’t expect us to accept its objectivity about the murder of women and children in a hotel or a Jewish center after unloading a few double-canister blasts of bias into the face of George Bush, John McCain, and the rest of the Republican Party. That’s dirty pool and Hoyt has no ground to complain when people call the paper on it.

Hoyt’s conclusion really has me shaking my head.

I do not think it is possible to write a set of hard and fast rules for the T-words, and I think The Times is both thoughtful about them and maybe a bit more conservative in their use than I would be.

Really? It’s not possible? Gosh, let’s see.

Rule: A terrorist is any person who commits a destructive act that specifically targets civilians to achieve a political goal.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Now, does that make the killers who attacked Bombay terrorists? Initially, no, because it was not clear that they had a political goal in mind. However, it didn’t take long before we learned that the killers (and that is the appropriate word to use before their goals were known) did have at least one political goal: to kill Westerners and Jews. When we learned that, my rule would have taken effect and we could have called them terrorists.

This applies in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as well. Does Hamas specifically target civilians? Yes, and so it is a terrorist group. Does the Israeli Army? No, and so it is not. However, if Hamas were to attack an Israeli Army post, their act would not be described as terrorist even though they are a terrorist group because it didn’t target civilians. If the Israeli Army started busting into houses and capping kids, then I’d call them terrorists, too. This isn’t tough.

In the end, Hoyt actually ends up coming down on the same side of the issue as I do. The only real difference between us is that he’s far too willing to make excuses for the rest of his industry and I’m not.

(via Hot Air Headline)