The White Supremacist Agenda of the War on Terror
By Aly Panjwani & Lea Kayali
The insurrectionist, white supremacist attacks on the U.S. Capitol brought to the fore a conversation about applying frameworks of terrorism to white supremacist violence. Newly inaugurated President Biden invokes the language of the national security state using coded, vague terms like radicalization and homegrown extremism. He intends to make “domestic terrorism” a priority for law enforcement in his administration. This is a mistake. While understandable, calls to define white violence as terrorism orientalize and distance this violence from the roots of American history. The framework of terrorism has always served the politics of otherization which protect and advance supremacist projects; it allows imperialist states to classify populations, namely Black, Brown, and Muslim communities, as national security threats to justify their political agendas. Calling white supremacists terrorists will not change the epistemological realities of the terrorism label — it will only further fuel the militarized practices of the War on Terror apparatus.
The national security state manufactured the War on Terror around the founding myth that terrorists opposed the American way of life. President George Bush outlined the blueprint for this scheme in his post-9/11 address to the country when he said “[t]errorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America.” Thus, in the eyes of the state, the terrorist label is only applied to those who could be seen to challenge the foundations of American power. Applying the framework of terrorism to describe white violence ignores the foundational white supremacist ideology that is at the heart of the War on Terror. In ideation and application, the targets of the War on Terror are not white.
Moreover, the War on Terror is predicated on the idea that terrorism is a kind of distant violence subject to exceptional rules of policing and war. This distinction is clear through the over twenty years of post-9/11 surveillance and policing that has devastated Black, Brown, and Muslim communities both here in the United States and across the globe. From the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the CIA’s torture program, to the FBI’s use of informants in the United States and designation of Black activists as “Black Identity Extremists,” counterterrorism policies aim to subjugate the communities that the state defines as security threats and assert control. As Atiya Husain explains, “[c]ounterterrorism is an organizing principle for delineating and managing problematic populations domestically and internationally.” In other words, it is a policy framework intended to suppress those who pose a demographic threat to the state.
After all, security theatre is integral to the War on Terror. Launching wars under false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction. Using democratization as a veneer for violence in the form of drone strikes throughout South Asia and the Middle East. Rounding up Muslim immigrant men and deporting them en masse so American streets can be safer from so-called homegrown extremists. Investing millions of dollars in pseudoscientific predictive policing techniques like Countering Violent Extremism programs. Coercing Muslims to become informants in their own communities. Undergirding this performance of security is the racist theory of radicalization that assumes communities of color are inherently violent and must be controlled — a philosophy that traces back through the War on Drugs, broken windows policing, and the foundations of law enforcement practices in America. The War on Terror is refined to produce terrorists out of demographic threats rather than respond to real ones. And white supremacy is a very real threat that needs a particular response which examines the systemic, historical roots of anti-Blackness in the United States.
Notably, the United States is not the only imperialist nation to employ the framework of terrorism to violently subjugate populations. Israel, for example, has long used the charge of terrorism to directly challenge Palestinian political existence and to maintain Jewish supremacy in the region. Israel’s Nation-State Law, passed in 2018, states that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” The Nation-State Law makes explicit that supremacist ideology birthed the politics of otherization and the framework of counterterrorism that Israel weaponizes against Palestinians. Israeli armed forces surveil, arrest, and use disproportionate violence against the Palestinians under the veil of the “security threat” they pose. Israeli government propaganda routinely spews race-bating and fear-mongering messages that push the narrative that all resistance to the military occupation of Palestine is terrorism. A stark example of the terrorism framework, Israel discounts and delegitimizes the very political existence of Palestinians in order to reinforce racial apartheid and quell the resistance to the occupation.
Similarly in India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) continues to remain powerful. Its Hindu supremacist ideology, at the core of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, envisions India as a uniquely Hindu state and labels Muslims as terrorists. This otherization is evident through the state’s Citizenship Amendment Act, intentionally leaving Muslims migrants out of the definition of Indian citizenship. The state’s violent subjugation of Kashmiri self-determination and control of the Muslim-majority population, often under the pretense of defending the nation against terrorism, further highlights its supremacist project, bolstered by the national security framework.
Even given this global weaponization of imagined, demographic threats, it is important to recognize why it is tempting to apply the framework of terrorism to white supremacists. On the one hand, it describes something accurate and palpable. White violence is intended to terrorize Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. There is a very real history of white terror in this country — a history that far predates 9/11. Despite this history, however, the term terrorism is now inextricable from the machinery of counterterrorism; terrorism is a vague but historically loaded term, taking new meanings in the post-9/11 context and rooted itself in white supremacy.
Calling white supremacist violence terrorism is also convenient. It serves the soothing myth that proud displays of racism and bigotry are not who we are in America, casting this abhorrent, racist violence far away from our construction of what America is and what it represents. Fundamentally, it rewrites white supremacy to the margins of the American story — a form of historical revisionism we cannot accept if we are ever to dismantle it. It is a convincing, consoling, lie. The truth is America is not the soul of democracy, we are the belly of the beast. White supremacy is not an aberration in this country, it is the foundation. And until we can name it for what it is, face it, and begin to abolish the systems that uphold it here and abroad, we will never heal.
