As a professor of international relations, I often have to radically adjust my syllabi from semester to semester. International politics changes so frequently that last year’s hot button issue is often no longer relevant the next time I teach a class. I offer my course on Terrorism every other year and it’s on the agenda for this coming fall. The last time I taught this class was Spring 2014. ISIS had just emerged on to the scene (the closest thing to a formal announcement of ISIS’s existence was April 2013, and only announced the establishment of the caliphate in July 2014, after the class had concluded) and the split between al Qaeda and ISIS occurred during the semester. So, one of the things I’m doing this summer is preparing my syllabus and refocusing it to deal more with ISIS. However, last week’s tragic and disgusting massacre in Charleston has given me something else to incorporate into the class. I already spend a day on domestic terrorism, but given all the reporting on whether Dylann Roof’s heinous act should be considered terrorism, I’m probably going to work that question directly into the class.
There’s been enough written about whether the attack should be classified as terrorism. I tend to think it should–it’s clear that Roof was not simply trying to kill a select group of people but rather send a message (he left one person alive to ensure his “message” would get out) in an attempt to create political change. To me and many others, that’s terrorism. But I’m more interested in why it matters what we call it. Nine people’s lives have been horrifically cut short, so why should we dicker over terminology?
It matters because different rules apply to terrorism than “regular” criminal activity and the authorities have different powers at their disposal to deal with terrorism. But more importantly to my mind it matters because “regular” criminal activity and terrorism are, in their essences, fundamentally different kinds of crimes. “Regular” crime is limited in scope and intent; it generally is an effort by an individual or small group of individuals to personally enrich themselves. While it might be very dangerous and even deadly, we recognize that its impact is generally confided to the perpetrators and the victims, limiting its impact. This is why, at least in the US, we have such strong protections for those accused of crimes (e.g. the strong evidentiary exclusionary laws that emerge from the 4th amendment): we tend to see the danger of an overzealous, anti-crime government as larger than the threat posed by any specific criminal.
But when the scope of criminal activity begins to move beyond the specific victims, we begin to sense that those protections might no longer make sense. Even when “regular” criminal activity grows in scope, the laws begin to adjust to compensate (think the federal RICO laws to deal with the problem of organized crime).
Nearly every definition of terrorism posits that terrorism is a crime designed not for personal enrichment but to produce political change. The victims are often, if not usually, symbolic and incidental to the political act which is aimed at a larger target (i,e. a country’s government or broader voting public). Terrorism threatens to undo the fabric and essence of society by sufficiently threatening the general public so as to cause the government to change course and alter policy.
Roof’s manifesto cites a desire to inspire others to follow in his footsteps. He expresses frustration at people talking about “the problem” but not taking action, and claims to have chosen Charleston as his target because “it is [the] most historic city in my state” that “at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites [sic] in the country.” He laments the absence of skinheads and the Ku Klax Klan and claims that it falls to him to “take it to the real world.”
And this is why it is necessary to argue about whether the massacre in the Charleston AME Church is an act of terrorism. It should come as no surprise that there is a large network of white supremacists operating in the US today. The first amendment, of course, protects the rights of an individual to espouse white supremacist ideology, racial pseudo-science, and hatred. But if Roof’s action was indeed intended to inspire others to follow in his footsteps, or was (and as far as I know there is no evidence of this) part of a larger planned campaign, then it is important to understand the action for what it is and treat it accordingly.
The murder of 9 people studying the Bible at their church is horrific regardless of the intent behind it. But Roof’s action seems intended to terrify other African-Americans, to get them to fear the society in which they live. It seems designed to get whites to reject the idea of the US as a “melting pot” (a phrase which Roof disparages in his manifesto). This is why we must reconceptualize organized campaigns of violence against blacks, Muslims, Jews, and any other racial, ethnic, or religious minority as terrorism. It seems unlikely that political violence could lead the government to change its policies towards America’s non-white, non-Christian populations, but it could change the attitudes of those peoples towards the government and the larger society. As we see in collapsing and failed states, when a government loses its legitimacy and ceases to adequately protect its population, chaos ensues. We recently saw in Baltimore what happens when people lose faith in their government. If Roof and other white supremacists have this as their goal, then they are indeed terrorists and must be treated as such.
UPDATE: At the very least, the definition matters because officers don’t typically buy fast food for suspected terrorists in their custody.
Seth, can you comment on where the concept of a “hate crime” falls in this pucture? How and why do we distinguish between hate crimes and terrorusm?
Interesting question. As I see it (and I am certainly no expert on domestic hate crime legislation), hate crime legislation emerged to address the very problem that I discuss in the original post. Certain crimes seem to go beyond “regular” crime and threaten broader audiences beyond the immediate victim; thus, they need special legislation to try to eliminate them. Hate crimes, it seems to me, differ from terrorism in several important dimensions such as intent (was the intent of the crime to create political change, or is it an unintended possibility?) and premeditation (for example, going by this account [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/the-story-of-a-hate-crime] of the shooting of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, NC, the murders emerged from the shooter’s hatred of religion but was catalyzed by a dispute over parking. The New Yorker piece puts it like this: “Perhaps it makes the most sense to think of anti-Muslim feeling as an enabler of Hicks’s crime rather than its cause”). Nevertheless, hate crimes can have the same effect on society as terrorism. Thomas Hobbes recognized this problem as far back as 1651, writing in Chapter XV of Leviathan “because all signs of hatred, or contempt, provoke to fight…we may…for a law of nature, set down this precept: that no man by deed, word, countenance, or gesture declare hatred or contempt of another.” The whole purpose of government, for Hobbes, was to remove people from the horrors of the state of nature where everyone lives in constant fear for their lives. The main and justifying purpose of government is to allow people to live in safety. But when one person declares his hatred of another, the second person might have reason to doubt the ability of government to protect her; after all, few if any governments can prevent one person from killing another. And when the second person fears that government can no longer protect her she is reverted back into the state of nature and the binding contract with the sovereign authority no longer exists. This is very similar to the process I describe in the original post, where terrorism causes people to question the ability of government to protect them, undermining the legitimacy of society and the state. So, as I see it, hate crimes are similar to terrorism in their effect on individuals and their corrosive effect on society, even if they differ in the specific details of their nature.
So if the two have the same corrosive effect it would seem to make sense that the state should have the same powers in prosecuting hate crimes as it does against terrorism. But if the standard is society losing the trust that the government will protect them, that would lead to perhaps the highest threat being the police inflicted crimes (Ferguson, NYC, Baltimore) I am not sure if I would call that terrorism, but I think it may rise to the same level as the NC case. The racism in the police cases enabled the crimes, even if it wasn’t the direct cause. Or is that state sanctioned terrorism? This is surely a tricky knot.
Even though they might have the same effect, it’s the nature of the act that determines the response. For example, “old school” terror groups like the IRA and the PLO killed people just as al Qaeda does, and the killings had similar effects on their targets. But because the nature of the actions and the groups were different, one would have to deal with the groups themselves differently. As I mentioned earlier, hate crimes aren’t terrorism because they differ in some important ways; treating them the same would likely cause problems (for example, if hate crimes are more isolated incidents with less premeditation, increasing the surveillance powers of the government would have no effect).
Would the Confederate flag flying over the capitol not constitute state terrorism? A constant reminder to African Americans of their ‘rightful’ place in society once the ‘South rises again’? If that is the case, wouldn’t it be the same when flown anywhere?
I would argue not although I certainly can see some merit in the claim. While I’m no first amendment scholar, I tend to be as close to a free speech absolutist as one can be. If we think about the Dennis v US and American Communications Association v Dowd cases that replaced the “clear and present danger” test for restricting free speech with a balancing approach, there typically needs to be specificity for speech to be seen as sufficiently threatening so as to be restrained. So while the Confederate battle flag might be seen as emblem of hate, because it does not make specific threats against specific individuals, I would think it shouldn’t be seen as an act of state terror. Virginia v Black addresses this issue pretty directly by striking down a law prohibiting cross burning because the law blurred the line between “threat and intimidation” and the promotion of ideology. I would see the battle flag in a similar light. Of course, Justice Thomas’s blistering dissent in that case comes down on the other side, and he very well might agree with you regarding the flag.
Matthew Evangelista has a nice riff on this in Law Ethics and the War on Terror. He points out that an Oregon court during the Bush administration enhanced a sentence for arson because of terrorism, related to ELF and ALF activism. In contrast, the Alabama Free Militia the same year prepared to kill Mexican immigrants, and were captured with 130 grenades, 2500 rounds of ammunition, 70 IEDs, and a lot else.
Evangelista’s point, which I think is right, is that terrorism legislation depends on politics (and identity politics in particular). If the shooter were Muslim (or apparently an environmentalist), it would be prosecuted as terrorism. If the shooter is white/Christian, it does not count as terrorism.
Oops. I should have added that the AFM was not prosecuted for terrorism.
Seth – as always, very insightful, but it’s begging what seems to me to be the obvious question. The issue before us isn’t so much how to address previous acts of terrorism (like Charleston) but rather what powers the government is granted by the people to prevent future acts. If Charleston is terrorism plain and simple, and the government refrains from taking actions in response that are similar to those following 9/11 (i.e preventive war, mass surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, etc.), then either we’re underreacting to Charleston, or we’re overreacting to the other, or there’s some other distinction between the two types of activity. Are you taking a view as to which of the three it is?
I’m also not sure I agree with the notion that terrorism somehow erodes the people’s confidence in the government to protect them using normal law enforcement means, and that in turn is what justifies more aggressive methods on behalf of the government. If you’re inclined to support the government methods in question, that’s a good argument – but I could just as easily say that some forms of terrorism are designed specifically to elicit those government responses because they do more damage than the acts themselves…hence an argument to treat THOSE acts of terrorism more like normal crime (if possible).
Bill…I tend to think that the government underreacts to domestic terrorism (but which I mean terrorism carried out by people not connected to international organizations; to my mind, an individual radicalized by al Qaeda or ISIS, even if an American citizen, is better understood as international terrorism), as Eric points out above. As to your second point, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Terrorists use what are known as provocation strategies, designed to provoke governments into responding in certain ways. The problem is that it’s not so easy for governments to NOT respond in those ways. For a variety of reasons, governments are often incapable of responding in purely rational, logical means (or, to be more precise, because governments have multiple audiences, they are often unable to respond optimally to the terror activity because, to give one example, electoral politics demands a response even if the law of diminishing marginal utility tells us that a response would be ineffective).
Following up on Eric G, I think the politicization of the term “terrorism” has become an additional problem. It began with certain groups being defined, or not being defined, as terrorists based more on who they are than on what they did. From there it has gone to making accusations of terrorism–or accusing others of not making accusations of terrorism–as a way to make a statement about yourself (or the opposite statement about your political rivals), rather than about the original act or its perpetrators. The politics surrounding Benghazi is full of this.
What an excellent post—the question about whether Dylan Roof’s actions constitute terrorism is supremely important. I think I would add one important fact–the slain senior pastor of the Charleston AME Church was an elected state representative in the South Carolina state legislature—so obviously, there was some immediate political change that the AME Church massacre accomplished–getting rid of one of South Carolina’s few advocates for social justice for its African-American citizens.
Everyone is so used to assigning the term “terrorist” (without thought, sometimes even carelessly) if the offender is brown, of Muslim background, that when a white male has been accused of terrorism, suddenly everyone is having a hard time swallowing the idea and wondering why we need to “play around with words” and “label it”. There is a pattern to the labels when the offenders are White (mental illness), Hispanic (thugs/gang violence), Black(thugs/gang violence), Brown (arab/sount asian/east asian) Muslims (terrorism/mastermind/ties to hate groups). Labeling slowly destroys, can seep its way into a racist mind, and can be extremely damaging over time when labels are extended to innocent people who are black, hispanic, or of muslim background. These discussions on whether Rooff is a terrorist are shocking, controversial, and to be quote honest, a very healthy way to look at how we have been labeling people for years. Yes white people CAN be terrorists, thugs, and involved in organized hate groups. A hard pill to swallow, but a very necessary conversation to have. If we keep dismissing White Supremacist hate violence with labels of “mental illness, lone wolf attacks, and disturbed individual who loved his heritage”, the hate will continue to breed, and more racism fueled violence will be seen as a result of living with zero accountability.
There’s no network of white supremacist terrorist out there.
And the police only got him food because he was being kept locked up in a conference room for hours waiting for the fbi to show up to interrogate him.