Stop Calling It Terrorism
The white supremacist attack on the Capitol on January 6 has shed light on many familiar problems around how such violence is covered by the media and reacted to by policy makers and even our own communities.
Discussions have taken place about how to talk about this attack, the use of the terrorism framework and what that means in prolonging the almost 20 year old Global War on Terror, and why even when an act of violence is clearly rooted in U.S. right-wing, white supremacist movements, some still rely on anti-Muslim metaphors to describe and respond to it.
By Nahid Soltanzadeh, MPower Change, Ramah Kudaimi, ACRE, and Munira Lokhandwala, LittleSis
Stop Calling It Terrorism
Plenty has been written- see links at the end- about why we must resist the urge to label this episode of white supremacist violence “terrorism” and that our goal should be to end the War on Terror, not expand it to include white people.
The problem is not that the state or even the public don’t know that “terrorist” applies to white people. Black activists have been reminding us that the very settling and founding of the US is the result of white terror. They are well aware of that- DHS themselves reported last October that white supremacists continue to be the deadliest US terror threat.
History is very clear that the “domestic terrorism” framework will only further harm BIPOC communities. The terrorism policy framework that has deliberately destroyed Muslim communities across the globe and criminalized activism ranging from Black liberation to Palestinian rights to environmental justice cannot be repurposed for fighting white supremacy. It’s doing its intended job by ignoring the history of white violence. The practice of designating individuals and groups as “terrorists” has been nothing more than a free pass for states from the U.S. to China to India to Saudi Arabia to imprison, torture, and kill as they wish. In the fight to end white supremacy we need to demand an end to the War on Terror and the rhetoric it perpetuates. We should talk about and deal with political violence from non state actors without all the baggage of “terrorism” that has served to whitewash state violence over the past two decades.
Stop Connecting White Supremacist Violence to Islam
What we have also witnessed whenever white, right-wing violence captures media attention is the almost automatic association of this violence with Muslims and Islam. When media figures continue to label these insurrectionists with terms such as Vanilla ISIS or pushing the narrative that they “don’t look like terrorists,” it obfuscates how white vigilantism is as old as the United States and instead presents violence as something inherently connected to — or sometimes worse, a product of — Islam and Muslims.
Reliance on a reference to Islam to convey that white supremacist violence is bad is anti-Muslim. It implies that the only reference point for violence is Islam. And as a consequence, it will make it even harder for the general public to understand this violence in its very American historical context.
When these attackers are ideologically connected to groups like the KKK and other white, right-wing forces, you have all you need in order to analyze the event in the context of U.S. history and its relationship to whiteness. Leave Islam out of it.
Stop Exceptionalizing the US
The other aspect of anti-Muslim bigotry that came out during the coverage is comparisons to “Muslim” places to insist this is not something that happens in the US but rather in Baghdad, Kabul, Syria, etc. Using Muslim majority cities and countries as examples of places riddled with violence and war rather than recognizing that political violence takes place regularly in the US and other white majority countries posits violence as a Muslim problem, rather than a problem of white supremacy.
Moreover, pretending one can interchangeably use these cities and countries as metaphors ignores their distinct histories, peoples, and current political realities and pushes the idea that “Muslim” places are all the same. It is particularly appalling when media figures and elected officials act shocked that Washington, DC now “feels like Kabul or Baghdad” when it is US imperialism, the War on Terror, and the very same US troops stationed in DC now that helped create the conditions of violence the people of Kabul, Baghdad, and other cities across the globe continue to live through. This moment begs for disrupting the false binary of U.S. domestic and foreign policy as well- the police being called on now to help protect the inauguration have long been used to oppress Black communities in DC. U.S. domestic policing, militarism, white supremacy, and imperialism are all connected and operate through a coherent system. Those who continue to resist recognizing it will have no choice than to hold on to Islamophobic tropes in order to make sense of what is happening and will bring them nowhere closer to rooting out the problem.
What Should We Be Doing
Our reaction at this moment should NOT be to provide the state even more tools to pursue an already problematic War on Terror (as we see happening with talks of more anti-terrorism legislation — which inevitably bring more funding to state agencies that harm our communities.) Instead, we should push for this country (the electeds, the media, the public) to recognize and come to terms with the violence of white supremacy that’s thread into its very fabric.
And within our Muslim communities, we should engage in honest, difficult conversations about the collective work that we still need to do to heal from the constant trauma of the War on Terror. Otherwise, our fight for justice will be trapped in reactivity, and we will keep replicating the dynamics that have harmed us.
As long as the leaders and the media continue to enforce American exceptionalism narratives around white violence and deflect public consciousness from the very Americanness of white supremacy to a racist, vague, notion of other violent Muslim countries and their issues, we won’t see the change we want to make.
We must push public figures to stop repeating these narratives. We must demand accountability from the elected officials who have inspired these attacks. We must demand that Big Tech fully acknowledge their role in spreading anti-Muslim bigotry and their role in materially and ideologically supporting the Global War on Terror. Big Tech must create transparent, accountable processes for rooting out bigotry on their platforms and imperialism in their business strategies, something groups have been demanding for years. If we don’t demand that Big Tech prioritize our communities over profits, we will continue to see issues of content, tech collaborating with military, states using platforms to whitewash crimes against Muslim communities, and more.
Here are some resources on why you should stop calling it Terrorism:
- Expanding the use of the word “terrorist” justifies broader resource allocation toward War on Terror
- Here’s Why We Avoid Calling White Supremacists “Domestic Terrorists”
- Reasons why calling yesterday “terrorism” is not a good idea
- For the love of god, stop calling it terrorism
- Language becomes policy
- While it may feel good at first blush to call the Capitol Mob domestic terrorists, it will only end up hurting communities of color
