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Lagging Badly
Why are the Western media so reluctant to call a terrorist a terrorist when acts
occur against citizens of other countries?
by Russell Working
Russell Working, a freelance writer, recently moved to Cyprus after five years
of living in the Russian Far East.
MOSCOW--The Chechen hostage-takers were men and women who held more than 800 theatergoers at gunpoint. They were prepared to blow up their victims and bring down the building on top of themselves.
They wore suicide explosive packs stuffed with nails and ball bearings, and they ruthlessly beat a man for climbing out of a makeshift orchestra-pit toilet in the wrong manner.
Not content with tormenting adults, they fired automatic rifles at a little boy who panicked after three days of sitting in an auditorium seat and ran for the exit screaming, “Mommy, I don’t know what to do.” The wild gunfire apparently missed the boy, but it killed two seated hostages. One of them, shot in the eye, bled to death from his head wound as the appalled hostages watched.
Yet some of the media covering the story--which ended in a commando release of approximately 750 hostages and the death of at least 128 victims and 50 terrorists Saturday--lapsed into bad habits familiar to those who read the news from Israel. Reluctant to take sides in Russia’s Chechen war, some reporters seemed incapable of referring to the killers as “terrorists” except in a quote. But one needn’t be in favor of bombarding Grozny to rubble or rounding up and imprisoning random Chechen men in order to see something warped about this.
CNN wins the prize for linguistic delicacy. At one point, three women escaped the theater and rushed into the arms of waiting law enforcement officials. “Witnesses heard the sound of two explosions which, sources said, was the dissidents’ [sic] firing bazookas during the women's escape,” CNN stated in an online report.
Dissidents? It brings to mind the image of a Soviet-era Nobel laureate, such as Andrei Sakharov or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, crouched in a theater doorway with a bazooka lodged on his shoulder as he fires rockets at fleeing women.
A Washington Post copy editor followed the lead of his and other papers’ Jerusalem bureaus when writing the headline, “50 Militants, 90 Hostages Dead After Moscow Siege” (the death toll would later rise).
But “militant”--a term reporters favor for those who slaughter civilians in Israel--also falls short. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word as “a fighting, warring, or aggressive person or party”--too broad a usage for bandits preparing to execute a theater full of people (or for murderers who blast nails into crowds of teenagers at a disco).
To be fair, journalists cannot report the Moscow hostage situation in isolation from Russia’s brutal Chechen war. Reporters must be impartial in covering conflicts, and they often find their stories offend both sides. On occasion I, too, have been accused of mincing words. One reader of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post was upset that I referred to Muslim Uighur “separatists,” rather than “terrorists,” because there had been several bombings by Uighur extremists in the Chinese region of Xinjiang.
But even if one acknowledges the difficult balancing act of a journalist, there is something galling about the inconsistency in terminology in the American media. When Americans are victims, as on 11 September 2001, reporters freely use the term “terrorists” or “terrorism.” This is true even when the victims are servicemen and -women, as when CNN noted on 15 October that the Bali attack “occurred on the two-year anniversary of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 sailors and wounded 39 others in the Gulf of Aden near Yemen.”
The carefulness in using the term “terrorist” in other people’s wars is mirrored by an excessive nicety in discussing the war against Islamic fascism. After last year’s attacks on the United States, the media followed U.S. President George W. Bush’s lead in insisting that Islam is not the enemy and that Muslims should not be singled out for reprisals. The impulse toward tolerance is to be commended.
But as the Jerusalem Post has noted, to describe this as a war against terrorism is like describing America’s battle against Japan in World War II as a war against sneak attacks. Terror is the means, not the enemy. And while Islam itself is also not the enemy, a radicalized faction of it is, and that faction draws loud support from hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide.
The rest of the world is no longer willing to indulge Muslim rage. A consensus has taken hold from New Delhi to New York that terror is repugnant, no matter how just a fight or downtrodden a people. Root causes are beside the point. Allah-ordained fatwas do not satisfy. There is no justification for strapping explosives to your body, settling into a seat in an auditorium amid 800 civilians, and smilingly telling your neighbor that you are looking forward to dying and taking her with you.
Perhaps someday, journalistic usage will catch up with that fact.
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