Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 17:16:43 +1100
From: saeed urrehman <saeed.urrehman-AT-anu.edu.au>
Subject: eqbal ahmad on terrorism (1998)


Terrorism: Theirs and Ours
By Eqbal Ahmad
(A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12, 1998)

http://www.sangam.org/ANALYSIS/Ahmad.htm


In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described 
as “TERRORIST.”  Then new things
happened.

By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with 
the Jewish people had built up in the
Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were 
Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-
45, as “freedom fighters.” At least two Israeli Prime Ministers, including 
Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in
the books and posters with their pictures, saying “Terrorists, Reward This 
Much.” The highest reward I have noted so far
was 100,000 British pounds on the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist.

hen from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, 
occupied the center stage as the terrorist
organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage 
of American journalism, William Safire of the
New York Times, as the “Chief of Terrorism.” That’s Yasir Arafat.

Now, on September 29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of 
Yasir Arafat to the right of President Bill Clinton.
o his left is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netan­yahu. Clinton is 
looking towards Arafat and Arafat is looking literally like
a meek mouse. Just a few years earlier he used to appear with this very 
menacing look around him, with a gun
appearing menacing from his belt. You remember those pictures, and you 
remember the next one.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. These 
bearded men I was writing about in those
days in The New Yorker, actually did. They were very ferocious-looking 
bearded men with turbans looking like they
came from another century. President Reagan received them in the White 
House. After receiving them he spoke to the
press. He pointed towards them, I’m sure some of you will recall that 
moment, and said, “These are the moral equivalent
of America’s founding fathers”. These were the Afghan Mujahiddin. They were 
at the time, guns in hand, battling the
Evil Empire. They were the moral equivalent of our founding fathers!

In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes from the 
American navy based in the Indian Ocean
to kill Osama Bin Laden and his men in the camps in Afghanistan. I do not 
wish to embarrass you with the reminder that
Mr. Bin Laden, whom fifteen American missiles were fired to hit in 
Afghanistan, was only a few years ago the moral
equivalent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson! He got angry over the 
fact that he has been demoted from
‘Moral Equivalent’ of your ‘Founding Fathers’. So he is taking out his 
anger in different ways. I’ll come back to that
subject more seriously in a moment.

You see, why I have recalled all these stories is to point out to you that 
the matter of terrorism is rather complicated.
errorists change. The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the 
hero of yesterday becomes the terrorist of
today. This is a serious matter of the constantly changing world of images 
in which we have to keep our heads straight
to know what is terrorism and what is not. But more importantly, to know 
what causes it, and how to stop it.

he next point about our terrorism is that posture of inconsistency 
necessarily evades definition. If you are not going to
be consistent, you’re not going to define. I have examined at least twenty 
official documents on terrorism. Not one
defines the word. All of them explain it, express it emotively, 
polemically, to arouse our emotions rather than exercise our
intelligence. I give you only one example, which is representative. October 
25, 1984. George Shultz, then Secretary of
State of the U.S., is speaking at the New York Park Avenue Synagogue. It’s 
a long speech on terrorism. In the State
Department Bulletin of seven single-spaced pages, there is not a single 
definition of terrorism. What we get is the
following:

Definition number one: “Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call 
terrorism.”

Definition number two is even more brilliant: “Terrorism is a form of 
political violence.” Aren’t you surprised? It is a form of
political violence, says George Shultz, Secretary of State of the U.S.

Number three: “Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization.”

Number four: “Terrorism is a menace to Western moral values.”

Did you notice, does it tell you anything other than arouse your emotions? 
This is typical. They don’t define terrorism
because definitions involve a commitment to analysis, comprehension and 
adherence to some norms of consistency.
hat’s the second characteristic of the official literature on terrorism.

he third characteristic is that the absence of definition does not prevent 
officials from being globalistic. We may not
define terrorism, but it is a menace to the moral values of Western 
civilization. It is a menace also to mankind. It’s a
menace to good order. Therefore, you must stamp it out worldwide. Our reach 
has to be global. You need a global
reach to kill it. Anti-terrorist policies therefore have to be global. Same 
speech of George Shultz: “There is no question
about our ability to use force where and when it is needed to counter 
terrorism.” There is no geographical limit. On a
single day the missiles hit Afghanistan and Sudan. Those two countries are 
2,300 miles apart, and they were hit by
missiles belonging to a country roughly 8,000 miles away. Reach is global.

A fourth characteristic: claims of power are not only globalist they are 
also omniscient. We know where they are;
therefore we know where to hit. We have the means to know. We have the 
instruments of knowledge. We are
omniscient. Shultz: “We know the difference between terrorists and freedom 
fighters, and as we look around, we have
no trouble telling one from the other.”

Only Osama Bin Laden doesn’t know that he was an ally one day and an enemy 
another. That’s very confusing for
Osama Bin Laden. I’ll come back to his story towards the end. It’s a real 
story.

Five. The official approach eschews causation. You don’t look at causes of 
anybody becoming terrorist. Cause? What
cause? They ask us to be looking, to be sympathetic to these people.

Another example. The New York Times, December 18, 1985, reported that the 
foreign minister of Yugoslavia, you
remember the days when there was a Yugoslavia, requested the Secretary of 
State of the U.S. to consider the causes
of Palestinian terrorism. The Secretary of State, George Shultz, and I am 
quoting from the New York Times, “went a bit
red in the face. He pounded the table and told the visiting foreign 
minister, there is no connection with any cause.
Period.” Why look for causes?

Number six. The moral revulsion that we must feel against terrorism is 
selective. We are to feel the terror of those
groups, which are officially disapproved. We are to applaud the terror of 
those groups of whom officials do approve.
Hence, President Reagan, “I am a contra.” He actually said that. We know 
the contras of Nicaragua were anything, by
any definition, but terrorists. The media, to move away from the officials, 
heed the dominant view of terrorism.

he dominant approach also excludes from consideration, more importantly to 
me, the terror of friendly governments. To
that question I will return because it excused among others the terror of 
Pinochet (who killed one of my closest friends)
and Orlando Letelier; and it excused the terror of Zia ul-Haq, who killed 
many of my friends in Pakistan. All I want to tell
you is that according to my ignorant calculations, the ratio of people 
killed by the state terror of Zia ul-Haq, Pino­chet,
Argentinian, Brazilian, Indonesian type, versus the killing of the PLO and 
other terrorist types is literally, conservatively,
one to one hundred thousand. That’s the ratio.

History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power and not to 
weakness. Therefore, visibility has been
accorded historically to dominant groups. In our time, the time that began 
with this day, Columbus Day.

he time that begins with Columbus Day is a time of extraordinary unrecorded 
holocausts. Great civilizations have been
wiped out. The Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs, the American Indians, the 
Canadian Indians were all wiped out. Their
voices have not been heard, even to this day fully. Now they are beginning 
to be heard, but not fully. They are heard,
yes, but only when the dominant power suffers, only when resistance has a 
semblance of costing, of exacting a price.
When a Custer is killed or when a Gordon is besieged. That’s when you know 
that they were Indians fighting, Arabs
fighting and dying.

My last point of this section – U.S. policy in the Cold War period has 
sponsored terrorist regimes one after another.
Somoza, Batista, all kinds of tyrants have been America’s friends. You know 
that. There was a reason for that. I or you
are not guilty. Nicaragua, contra. Afghanistan, mujahiddin. El Salvador, etc.

Now the second side. You’ve suffered enough. So suffer more.

here ain’t much good on the other side either. You shouldn’t imagine that I 
have come to praise the other side. But
keep the balance in mind. Keep the imbalance in mind and first ask 
ourselves, What is terrorism?

Our first job should be to define the damn thing, name it, give it a 
description of some kind, other than “moral equivalent
of founding fathers” or “a moral outrage to Western civilization”. I will 
stay with you with Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary:
“Terror is an intense, overpowering fear.” He uses terrorizing, terrorism, 
“the use of terrorizing methods of governing or
resisting a government.” This simple definition has one great virtue, that 
of fairness. It’s fair. It focuses on the use of
coercive violence, violence that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, 
to coerce. And this definition is correct because it
treats terror for what it is, whether the government or private people 
commit it.

Have you noticed something? Motivation is left out of it. We’re not talking 
about whether the cause is just or unjust.
We’re talking about consensus, consent, absence of consent, legality, 
absence of legality, constitutionality, absence of
constitutionality. Why do we keep motives out? Because motives differ. 
Motives differ and make no difference.

I have identified in my work five types of terrorism.

First, state terrorism. Second, religious terrorism; terrorism inspired by 
religion, Catholics killing Protestants, Sunnis killing
Shiites, Shiites killing Sunnis, God, religion, sacred terror, you can call 
it if you wish. State, church. Crime. Mafia. All
kinds of crimes commit terror. There is pathology. You’re pathological. 
You’re sick. You want the attention of the whole
world. You’ve got to kill a president. You will. You terrorize. You hold up 
a bus. Fifth, there is political terror of the private
group; be they Indian, Vietnamese, Algerian, Palestinian, Baader-Meinhof, 
the Red Brigade. Political terror of the private
group. Oppositional terror.

Keep these five in mind. Keep in mind one more thing. Sometimes these five 
can converge on each other. You start
with protest terror. You go crazy. You become pathological. You continue. 
They converge. State terror can take the
form of private terror. For example, we’re all familiar with the death 
squads in Latin America or in Pakistan. Government
has employed private people to kill its opponents. It’s not quite official. 
It’s privatized. Convergence. Or the political
terrorist who goes crazy and becomes pathological. Or the criminal who 
joins politics. In Afghanistan, in Central America,
the CIA employed in its covert operations drug pushers. Drugs and guns 
often go together. Smuggling of all things often
go together.

Of the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the least important 
in terms of cost to human lives and human
property [Political Terror of those who want to be heard]. The highest cost 
is state terror. The second highest cost is
religious terror, although in the twentieth century religious terror has, 
relatively speaking, declined. If you are looking
historically, massive costs. The next highest cost is crime. Next highest, 
pathology. A Rand Corporation study by Brian
Jenkins, for a ten-year period up to 1988, showed 50% of terror was 
committed without any political cause at all. No
politics. Simply crime and pathology.

So the focus is on only one, the political terrorist, the PLO, the Bin 
Laden, whoever you want to take. Why do they do
it? What makes the terrorist tick?

I would like to knock them out quickly to you. First, the need to be heard. 
Imagine, we are dealing with a minority group,
the political, private terrorist. First, the need to be heard. Normally, 
and there are exceptions, there is an effort to be
heard, to get your grievances heard by people. They’re not hearing it. A 
minority acts. The majority applauds.

he Palestinians, for example, the superterrorists of our time, were 
dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to 1968 they went
to every court in the world. They knocked at every door in the world. They 
were told that they became dispossessed
because some radio told them to go away - an Arab radio, which was a lie. 
Nobody was listening to the truth. Finally,
they invented a new form of terror, literally their invention: the airplane 
hijacking. Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled
the world up by its ears. They dragged us out and said, Listen, Listen. We 
listened. We still haven’t done them justice,
but at least we all know. Even the Israelis acknowledge. Remember Golda 
Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, saying in 1970,
‘There are no Palestinians.’ They do not exist. They damn well exist now. 
We are cheating them at Oslo. At least there
are some people to cheat now. We can’t just push them out. The need to be 
heard is essential. One motivation there.

Mix of anger and helplessness produces an urge to strike out. You are 
angry. You are feeling helpless. You want
retribution. You want to wreak retributive justice. The experience of 
violence by a stronger party has historically turned
victims into terrorists. Battered children are known to become abusive 
parents and violent adults. You know that. That’s
what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. 
State terror very often breeds collective
terror.

Do you recall the fact that the Jews were never terrorists? By and large 
Jews were not known to commit terror except
during and after the Holocaust. Most studies show that the majority of 
members of the worst terrorist groups in Israel or in
Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs, were people who were immigrants 
from the most anti-Semitic countries of
Eastern Europe and Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the 
Palestinians from the refugee camps are
battered people. They become very violent. The ghettos are violent 
internally. They become violent externally when
there is a clear, identifiable external target, an enemy where you can say, 
‘Yes, this one did it to me’. Then they can
strike back.

Example is a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized 
Beirut hijacking of the TWA plane. After that
hijacking, there were hijacking attempts at nine different American 
airports. Pathological groups or individuals modeling
on the others. Even more serious are examples set by governments. When 
governments engage in terror, they set very
large examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they engage in other 
sets of examples.

Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim terrorism. 
Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror. Those of
you who are familiar with revolutionary theory know the debates, the 
disputes, the quarrels, the fights within
revolutionary groups of Europe, the fight between anarchists and Marxists, 
for example. But the Marxists have always
argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be 
sociologically and psychologically selective. Don’t hijack a
plane. Don’t hold hostages. Don’t kill children, for God’s sake. Have you 
recalled also that the great revolutions, the
Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Algerian, the Cuban, never engaged in 
hijacking type of terrorism? They did engage in
terrorism, but it was highly selective, highly sociological, still 
deplorable, but there was an organized, highly limited,
selective character to it. So absence of revolutionary ideology that begins 
more or less in the post-World War II period
has been central to this phenomenon.

My final question is - These conditions have existed for a long time. But 
why then this flurry of private political terrorism?
Why now so much of it and so visible? The answer is modern technology. You 
have a cause. You can communicate it
through radio and television. They will all come swarming if you have taken 
an aircraft and are holding 150 Americans
hostage. They will all hear your cause. You have a modern weapon through 
which you can shoot a mile away. They
can’t reach you. And you have the modern means of communicating. When you 
put together the cause, the instrument
of coercion and the instrument of communication, politics is made. A new 
kind of politics becomes possible.

o this challenge rulers from one country after another have been responding 
with traditional methods. The traditional
method of shooting it out, whether it’s missiles or some other means. The 
Israelis are very proud of it. The Americans are
very proud of it. The French became very proud of it. Now the Pakistanis 
are very proud of it. The Pakistanis say, ‘Our
commandos are the best.’ Frankly, it won’t work. A central problem of our 
time, political minds, rooted in the past, and
modern times, producing new realities. Therefore in conclusion, what is my 
recommendation to America?

Quickly. First, avoid extremes of double standards. If you’re going to 
practice double standards, you will be paid with
double standards. Don’t use it. Don’t condone Israeli terror, Pakistani 
terror, Nicaraguan terror, El Salvadoran terror, on
the one hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or Palestinian terror. 
It doesn’t work. Try to be even-handed. A
superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to 
discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t
work in this shrunken world.

Do not condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them. Fight them. Punish 
them. Please eschew, avoid covert
operations and low-intensity warfare. These are breeding grounds of terror 
and drugs. Violence and drugs are bred
there. The structure of covert operations, I’ve made a film about it, which 
has been very popular in Europe, called
Dealing with the Demon. I have shown that wherever covert operations have 
been, there has been the central drug
problem. That has been also the center of the drug trade. Because the 
structure of covert operations, Afghanistan,
Vietnam, Nicaragua, Central America, is very hospitable to drug trade. 
Avoid it. Give it up. It doesn’t help.

Please focus on causes and help ameliorate causes. Try to look at causes 
and solve problems. Do not concentrate on
military solutions. Do not seek military solutions. Terrorism is a 
political problem. Seek political solutions. Diplomacy
works.

ake the example of the last attack on Bin Laden. You don’t know what you’re 
attacking. They say they know, but
they don’t know. They were trying to kill Qadaffi. They killed his 
four-year-old daughter. The poor baby hadn’t done
anything. Qadaffi is still alive. They tried to kill Saddam Hussein. They 
killed Laila Bin Attar, a prominent artist, an
innocent woman. They tried to kill Bin Laden and his men. Not one but 
twenty-five other people died. They tried to
destroy a chemical factory in Sudan. Now they are admitting that they 
destroyed an innocent factory, one-half of the
production of medicine in Sudan has been destroyed, not a chemical factory. 
You don’t know. You think you know.

Four of your missiles fell in Pakistan. One was slightly damaged. Two were 
totally damaged. One was totally intact. For
ten years the American government has kept an embargo on Pakistan because 
Pakistan is trying, stupidly, to build
nuclear weapons and missiles. So we have a technology embargo on my 
country. One of the missiles was intact. What
do you think a Pakistani official told the Washington Post? He said it was 
a gift from Allah. We wanted U.S. technology.
Now we have got the technology, and our scientists are examining this 
missile very carefully. It fell into the wrong hands.
So don’t do that. Look for political solutions. Do not look for military 
solutions. They cause more problems than they
solve.

Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international law. There 
was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn’t
they go to it first to get their warrant against Bin Laden, if they have 
some evidence? Get a warrant, then go after him.
Internationally. Enforce the U.N. Enforce the International Court of 
Justice, this unilateralism makes us look very stupid
and them relatively smaller.

Q&A

he question here is that I mentioned that I would go somewhat into the 
story of Bin Laden, the Saudi in Afghanistan
and didn’t do so, could I go into some detail? The point about Bin Laden 
would be roughly the same as the point
between Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was accused and convicted of encouraging 
the blowing up of the World Trade
Center in New York City. The New Yorker did a long story on him. It’s the 
same as that of Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani
Baluch who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA agents. Let me see 
if I can be very short on this. Jihad, which
has been translated a thousand times as “holy war,” is not quite just that. 
Jihad is an Arabic word that means, “to
struggle.” It could be struggle by violence or struggle by non-violent 
means. There are two forms, the small jihad and the
big jihad. The small jihad involves violence. The big jihad involves the 
struggles with self. Those are the concepts. The
reason I mention it is that in Islamic history, jihad as an international 
violent phenomenon had disappeared in the last four
hundred years, for all practical purposes. It was revived suddenly with 
American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet
Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator of 
Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an
opportunity and launched a jihad there against godless communism.  The U.S. 
saw a God-sent opportunity to mobilize
one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the Evil Empire. Money 
started pouring in. CIA agents starting going all
over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin 
Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was
not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not only a Saudi. He was also 
a multimillionaire, willing to put his own
money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the 
jihad against communism.

I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official 
of whom I do not know whether he was or
was not an agent. I was talking to him and said, ‘Who are the Arabs here 
who would be very interesting?’ By here I
meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said, ‘You must meet Osama.’ I went 
to see Osama. There he was, rich,
bringing in recruits from Algeria, from Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh 
Abdul Rahman. This fellow was an ally. He
remained an ally. He turns at a particular moment. In 1990 the U.S. goes 
into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is
the holy place of Muslims, Mecca and Medina. There had never been foreign 
troops there. In 1990, during the Gulf
War, they went in, in the name of helping Saudi Arabia defeat Saddam 
Hussein. Osama Bin Laden remained quiet.
Saddam was defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land of the 
kaba (the sacred site of Islam in Mecca),
foreign troops. He wrote letter after letter saying, Why are you here? Get 
out! You came to help but you have stayed on.
Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His mission is to 
get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His
earlier mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan. See what I 
was saying earlier about covert operations?

A second point to be made about him is these are tribal people, people who 
are really tribal. Being a millionaire doesn’t
matter. Their code of ethics is tribal. The tribal code of ethics consists 
of two words: loyalty and revenge. You are my
friend. You keep your word. I am loyal to you. You break your word, I go on 
my path of revenge. For him, America has
broken its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore 
blood loyalty has betrayed you. They’re
going to go for you. They’re going to do a lot more.

hese are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost. This is 
why I said to stop covert operations.
here is a price attached to those that the American people cannot calculate 
and Kissinger type of people do not know,
don’t have the history to know.



Eqbal Ahmad, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Middle 
Eastern Studies at Hampshire College in
Amherst, Massachusetts, also served as a managing editor of the quarterly 
Race and Class. A prolific writer, his articles
and essays have been published in The Nation, Dawn (Pakistan), among 
several other journals throughout the world.
He died in 1999.
Courtesy: University of Colorado




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