WHEN WORDS PREVENT UNDERSTANDING

By: Amir Taheri

The classical Persian historian Mostowfi insists that words used to describe a historic event determine our understanding of it. Deprived of precision, words become barriers to knowledge. Let us apply that paradigm to some of the words used with regard to the events that shook New York and Washington on Sept. 11.

President George W. Bush was among the first to describe the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as ‘war’. ‘We are faced with the first war of the 21st century,’ he said. This triggered verbal avalanches with the word ‘war’ used in most headlines in the United States.

Without knowing it, Bush and the US headline-writers were bestowing on the two attacks a dignity not merited. War is recognized under international law as a legal activity, in fact, a right that every nation can exercise in defense of it’s legitimate interests or on behalf of the United Nations. All nations have defense ministries, armies, and rules of engagement. War is subject to precise laws, the violation of which is a high crime. Under international law, war must be declared once all other channels for resolving conflict have been exhausted. In other words, waging war is legal. But flying civilian aircraft, filled with innocent passengers, into office buildings with the clear intention of causing mass slaughter is not.

Some half-wits at the other end of the world have described the attacks on New York and Washington as ‘holy war.’ That, too, is nonsense. All the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, allow for ‘holy war’-again under strict rules. The conditions fixed for declaring such wars are so complex, often contradictory, that it is virtually impossible to achieve consensus for such an act.

Over the past 1700 years, that is to say since Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of Rome, scores of ‘holy wars’ have been declared and waged often by one Christian power against another. No serious Christian theologian, however, would now qualify any of those wars as ‘holy’.

The same is even more true of Islam, a religion which does not recognize a central church, or state authority. In other words, ‘holy war’ is in practice impossible in both Christianity and Islam, and must be regarded as a purely theoretical matter in theology.

Yet another word used by the Western media is kamikaze’. That, too, is misplaced in this context. Kamikaze, a Japanese word, describes a Samurai, that is to say a knight-warrior, who sacrifices his life to save his comrades from fatal defeat in battle.

In 1941, the word ‘kamikaze’ was misused by Japanese fascists to describe pilots who flew their aircraft into American warships stationed at Pearl Harbor, thus committing suicide but also destroying the US Pacific fleet. Strictly speaking, those pilots were not ‘kamikaze’. Many acted under military orders. Their attack did not come in the context of the battle, and these they killed were people who were sleeping, no fighting. Since the Japanese do not believe in any next world, the pilots who died at Pearl Harbor would never find out that they were cheated. They died as murderous savages who attacked sleeping men, men who were not even at war, something that no true ‘kamikaze’ would ever do.

In any case, the word ‘kamikaze’ cannot be applied to the individuals who hijacked the US planes. Those individuals were using civilian, not military planes. They were not sacrificing their own lives only but also the lives of hundreds of civilians, from many nationalities, who did not wish to die. Worse still, the hijackers killed air-stewardesses to force the pilots to open the cockpit and come out. No Samurai, not even a Robin (low-class vagabond fighter), would harm non-combatants, especially women.

What about the word ‘terrorism’? Even that word, overused and abused, may not be applicable to the events of Sept. 11. Terrorism, as it’s name implies, is designed to terrorize, not necessarily to kill. Of course, acts of terrorism can, and often do, cause loss of innocent life. But the principal goal of the terrorist is to terrify the public into exerting pressure on the authorities to adopt or change a policy.

This is why most terrorist groups announce the planting of their bombs and, often, give police enough time to defuse the bombs. When the classical terrorist commits murder his targets are officials, often security personnel, not just anybody who is flying from Boston to New York or working in an office in a tower block.

There are other differences. The first is that the terrorist has a set of demands which if met, or at least accepted for negotiations, would persuade him to desist from further violence. But the individuals who organized the attacks in New York and Washington never made any demands to anybody. They didn’t ask anybody to negotiate with them or even to surrender to them. They just went ahead and caused death on a grand scale. It is hard to claim that their demands had been made either by Bin Laden or his associate Mullah Omar. Bin Laden has made many demands in his time. But he now swears that he had nothing to do with those New York and Washington guys who are, of course, no longer there to contradict him. As for Omar, he has condemned the guys who bloodied New York and Washington. So we must assume that those guys had no demands or even motives which could remotely explain an act of classical terror, let alone what they actually did.

The second difference is that terrorism could be understood, though never justified, in societies where there is no possibility of norms, political activity in pursuit of one’s ideals. The US, however, is an open society. There are over 3,000 Internet sites in the US propagating Islam and promoting ideas that Bin Laden or Mullah Omar claim to share. There are also thousands of mosques, 30 Islamic television channels and countless radio stations. If Bin Laden is really a billionaire there is nothing to stop him from buying the control of a big American newspaper or starting a new one to propagate his ideas. This is what the South Korean fundamentalist Reverand Moon did 12 years ago when he bought the Washington Times. In the US< anyone who has an idea, even the most outlandish, can promote it, lobby for it, demonstrate for it, even die for it. No need to kill for it.

Let us come to another word-in fact a phrase: ‘clash of civilizations’, used to describe the events and what may follow.

This is unfortunate. The word ‘civilization’ should not be associated with acts that are manifestly uncivilized and not remotely sanctioned by any civilization ever. What we saw was a number of brainwashed individuals representing nothing but nihilism, clashing with three buildings…Their act needs to be studied more by experts in psychotherapy than politics.

Those events represent a more tragic version of the Jonestown collective suicides in which hundreds of fanatics, deprived of reason, were persuaded by their mad guru to kill themselves and their dear ones.

To use wrong terms to discuss such individuals is to dignify them, and that could put us on the wrong track, both in understanding the phenomenon and in combating it.