In a war, words may kill too.
The best evidence of this statement is the global controversy surrounding the use of the expressions ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ in the world press. The verbal battle involving governments, organizations and individuals has minimized the causes and consequences of the war between Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas.
A polarization that is beginning to contaminate our daily lives worldwide, as in the case of Afghan refugees in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, attacked by an angry Israeli because they looked like Arab militants, or in the Russian city of Makhachkala (in Daghestan region) where a group of Jews was confronted by Palestinian sympathizers in an obscure incident, before flying to Moscow.
The war of words arises when the same expression gets different meanings depending on the political-ideological options of those who use it in the press or official statements. Terrorism is a political tactic involving acts of physical or psychological violence, adopted by a country, party or ideological organization to promote its demands or ideas.
But when used to describe someone or some institution, the same word takes on distinct characteristics and configures a political and ideological derogative label. It is this confusion between definition and positioning that is at the origin of the differences in the use of the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in the news produced by journalistic organizations all over the world.
An organization, party or movement may promote a political cause and occasionally, depending on the circumstances, adopt terrorism as a tactic to deal with specific obstacles. The Associated Press news agency, treats Hamas as a political movement, claiming that the organization’s strategic objective is to reconstitute Palestine and that it uses terrorism as a tactical resource. The distinction is relevant because it avoids associating a permanent structural cause with a transitory act or tactic.
Defenders of Zionism went through this experience. They adopted terrorism between 1931 and 1948 when the Irgun and Haganah movements faced British colonial troops in the fight for the creation of the state of Israel. Respected Jewish leaders, such as former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, were supporters of terrorism when they were members of the Irgun, but after achieving their political objectives, they were no longer treated as such and gained respectability even among their former enemies. A similar situation occurred in several other countries, such as South Africa, where former president Nelson Mandela was classified as a terrorist leader before becoming respected worldwide as a defender of racial equality.
A potentially lethal issue
The political use of the expressions terrorism and terrorist is part of the arsenal of belligerent rhetoric of governments and parties but is unjustifiable when used by newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations, or news sites on the internet. This is because it implies a position taken by the journalistic vehicle, compromising the perception that their respective audiences will have about the facts and events published.
The press as an institution can freely choose how it wishes to position itself in the face of terrorism as a political strategy, but when it comes to producing news for public consumption, newspapers, magazines, websites and television news programs cannot use the term terrorist to define characters and organizations. This is equivalent to inducing a prior judgment, as stated by Chuck Simpson, leading advisor to the vice-president of the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), Canada’s public TV, with a status equivalent to that of the English BBC, in an interview to the North American magazine Mother Jones.
The complexity of using the expression terrorism led the world press to take different positions on the problem. The New York Times initially defined Hamas as a terrorist, then began to call its members armed militants and more recently returned to using the term ‘terrorists’. The Los Angeles Times classified the capture of Israeli hostages as a terrorist act, but refers to Hamas as a political movement. The Arab TV network Al Jazzera network treats Hamas members as fighters, while the British newspaper The Guardian avoids the use of qualifiers, claiming that “the same individual can be a terrorist for some and a freedom fighter for others”.
In Latin America, the majority of the mainstream press identifies the Arab movement that controls the Gaza Strip as a terrorist organization, while in Africa and Asia, there is no unanimous agreement on how to treat the Palestinian organization. The diversity of positions on the issue of terrorism shows how press executives are more concerned with establishing their ideological position than with the potentially lethal consequences that certain expressions may have on readers, listeners, viewers or internet users.
(Translated from a Portuguese text using Google Translator and Grammarly)
