It's probably a mistake to universalize a lesson from
a single loser like this guy who murdered two Israeli diplomats for no apparent reason except "Free Palestine." It was obviously, definitionally, an act of terrorism because he shot noncombatant civilians (employees of an Embassy, even, with diplomatic protections) in order to advance a political agenda.
However, his own personal and inexplicable decision to travel across several states to shoot two random people is obviously not part of a strategy by an organized group; these weren't even two crucial officers of the Embassy, just two young employees of no special importance. The other groups the shooter associated himself with -- BLM, ANSWER, etc. -- are the ordinary sort of Left-wing political groups that winks at violence, and maybe the occasional riot, but they're not executing a Hamas-style orchestration of terror on an organized scale. These groups are self-described radicals, but not "
terrorist organizations" -- even though they occasionally produce an actual terrorist like this one.
It does point up how strange our cultural debate is at the moment about these two terms, though, "terrorism" and "genocide." We do have functional definitions if we wanted to use them, but mostly people want to use the emotional weight of the language rather than restricting themselves to its rational meaning.
Genocide, for example, has a
definition. It's a new word, too, so the usual drift of natural language hasn't affected it much yet. We might say our present debate was natural language trying to exert itself on the definition, but a brake on that is that the word was newly coined and then
codified in an international treaty. It's a very strong case for a word that means something.
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as:
... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2[9]
There's a little bit of ambiguity, but not much. "Killing members of the group" doesn't mean, say, two members: the DC shooting wasn't an act of "genocide" even though the shooter explicitly targeted these two Jews for their group-membership.
This can extend to very large numbers in cases of war in which two ethnic groups or national groups are fighting each other, because their intent is not to destroy each other as a group, only to win their war aims. I don't think the current war in Israel is an example of genocide because the Israelis don't really seem to be trying to exterminate Palestinians as such, nor so far even to expel them from Gaza (as I frankly expected they would) in order to create a larger buffer zone given the October 7th demonstration that they were currently very vulnerable. The 50,000 figure killed is a tiny percentage of the total population of Palestinians, and 2.5% even of the population within Gaza -- a pretty restrained bit of killing given the intensity of the fighting and Israel's clear superiority in weapons.
Likewise, it doesn't extend to conflicts within a group: in the Syrian civil war, for example, fourteen million people were forced out of their homes and many killed or harmed, but nobody thought it was a genocide. There was even a religious difference here and there, Alawites and Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis, and even ethnic differences between Arabs and Kurds (who sometimes appeal to ancestral faiths as well). It wasn't thought a genocide all the same.
Is what is going on in South Africa
genocide? The President and the media both have very certain opinions about that. Definitely there has been a campaign of killing/harming Boers in order to extract their land and resources to transfer to another ethnic group. The government of South Africa denies there is any intent
by the government to engage in genocide, but that isn't a requirement under the convention: the fact that a large political party seems to be encouraging and celebrating all this (as President Trump decided to point out in a rather theatrical fashion this week) without the government doing much to discourage them may satisfy the requirement.
If the Boers had their own government, you could say that there was a war aim of seizing their land -- South Africa's history over the last two centuries is riddled with that. "Genocide" didn't exist as a term when
Shaka Zulu was around; the Boer Wars might not qualify because the British attempting to subjugate the Boers were "white" as well, although I think they recognized a real ethnic difference between themselves in those days. However, the Boers are not a state or state-like entity waging a war, either offensive or defensive; like the Uighur (who definitely are suffering a genocide), they're a subjugated population whose government hates them.
It seems like we should be able to get to clarity on this, given that we have a relatively clear standard that is formally codified. Our cultural institutions are not even trying to build a case either way, though; they're just asserting that it is obviously or obviously isn't.
4 comments:
Could you be leaning a little too heavily on the Hamas 10/7 example in your judgement about whether what BLM/ANSWER/pro-Palestinian aligned individuals are engaging in is terrorism? What was usually called 'terrorism' in the 1960s through 1990s (or so) from the various Palestinian and Marxist organizations to me bears more than a little resemblance to somewhat random and sporadic attacks we see from those groups. Outside of 9/11 there haven't been many attacks with the scale of casualties of 10/7. I don't think anybody objected to calling what was happening back then terrorism because the number of casualties in any one attack were low.
Maybe an even better example would be the attacks the IRA carried out or reaching back to our own history for KKK activities.
If the purpose is "pour encourager les autres" one doesn't need a very large campaign of terrorism.
I wouldn't have a problem designating the KKK in its second formation as a terrorist organization, even though mostly it existed to exert (once substantial) political power clandestinely. You might also reasonably so designate the first KKK, a guerrilla organization that preferred what we now classify as protected noncombatants. The current one (such as it is) doesn't seem to be organized to much purpose at all except occasional whining, and as such probably doesn't merit the term.
Both the Palestinian and Marxist organizations were also organized to revolutionary purpose: the destruction of the political order that is the state of Israel, or the destruction/overthrow through revolution of all of the various states of the world in the latter case.
BLM and its ilk produce some revolutionary talk, but they weren't organized for the purpose of overthrowing a political order. They were organized for the purpose of extracting money and concessions from within a political order. Revolutionary violence wasn't at their core, though protests that spun into violent riots were definitely something they accepted.
Now ANTIFA is a kind of side case: it's revolutionary, but not in a strict sense an organization. It's a kind of group of freely-associating individuals united(ish) by ideology (ranging from Marxist to Anarchocommunist to Anarchist). They all agree the world would be better off without capitalism and the states that support it, and many of them ideologically accept revolution as the way to get there. Their organizing is limited to getting the individuals together for this or that protest, though: they're not organizing a military campaign, say.
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