NYT's Accommodation of Terrorism - Separating Terrorism from Its Purported Motives

"Separating the Terror and the Terrorists"
WK10 (Week-in-Review), Sunday 12/14/08
By Clark Hoyt

In this revelatory article, Clark Hoyt, public editor of the NYT, illuminates how the paper’s editorial staff and bureau chiefs view the current debate regarding usage of the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist.” This entire debate has been vividly revived since the recent Mumbai terrorist attacks as many have expressed fierce disapproval that the Times has labeled the murderous Mumbai perpetrators as “‘militants,’ ‘gunmen,’ ‘attackers’ and ‘assailants’”—but never terrorists.

Hoyt shares that the NYT is quite cognizant of the “connotations of opprobrium” that the term ‘terrorist’ carries, leading to hesitation in usage of the term since once an individual is designated a terrorist, “he is an enemy of all civilized people, and his cause is less worthy of consideration.”

And therein lays precisely the problem. It is evident that the NYT does not wish to label certain organizations/individuals as ‘terrorist’ because this would besmirch their good name when they have legitimate grievances they are attempting to redress—and that the NYT may sympathize with. It seems shocking that NYT foreign editor, Susan Chira, believes that the paper should “proceed with caution, not rushing to label any group with the word terrorist before we have a deeper understanding of its full dimensions.”

What full dimensions are there to understand? Terrorism has clearly observable characteristics, on the most basic level being the intentional targeting and killing of innocent civilians for political gain. This is a wholly empirical question. For the NYT, however, what also counts is motive, and if the motive of that individual/organization is somehow legitimate or righteous then they should not be classified as terroristis.

If we are to believe that employment of terrorism is beyond the pale of civilization, the legitimacy of that individual/organization should automatically be discounted if they use such inhumane tactics. For the NYT though, they do not focus on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the attack, but on the legitimacy of the grievance or motive that the individual/organization presents. This is despite the fact that any such individual/group can fabricate a seemingly legitimate grievance. Usage of terrorism should logically belie the claim that the individual/organization seeks the redress of legitimate grievances, since application of such tactics demonstrates that a much deeper extremism underlies the individual/organization’s motives.

In a similar vein, would civilized society ever countenance rape and accept any ‘legitimate’ grievances that a rapist produced (e.g. ‘She was leading me on’ or ‘Wearing that outfit she was asking for it’)? There is no acceptable excuse for rape as there should be no acceptable grievance for terrorism, a tactic which is explicit in its aim to harm and maim civilian life.

The NYT’s understanding of terrorism is essential in its Israel-related coverage as this “issue [regarding what constitutes terrorism] comes up most often in connection with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.” In this arena, it is clear that the NYT accepts many of the grievances provided by Palestinian terrorist organizations, particularly in relation to the Disputed Territories of West Bank and Gaza.

In this context, it is no surprise that James Bennet, former Times Jerusalem bureau chief (2001-2004), composed a memo for the NYT in which he explains that he would use the label terrorist “to describe attacks within Israel’s 1948 borders but not in the occupied West Bank or Gaza, which Israel and the Palestinians have been contending over since Israel took them in 1967.” If the motive is legitimate—in the case of the NYT, eliminating any Jewish-Israeli presence from the Disputed Territories—then what is empirically terrorism is not terrorism. It is all relative to what the observer views as legitimate and illegitimate.

The resultant lack of a uniform standard on terrorism allowed Bennet to inexcusably designate a Palestinian terrorist, who “infiltrated a settlement and killed a 5-year-old girl in her bed,” as simply a “gunman.” International norms of warfare exist, but in the endeavor of erasing Jewish-Israeli presence from the territories, anything goes.

Ethan Bronner, the current Jerusalem bureau chief, continues the NYT tradition general avoidance and sparing use of the term terrorist, even when the situation clearly calls for such a classification. Bronner states: “Our general view is that the word terrorist is politically loaded and overused.” Given how the NYT, and the overwhelming majority of U.S. media outlets have systematically evaded the term for years, this is plainly not the case.

In the end of the article, Hoyt also comes to reject this avoidance and the worldview of many of his colleagues:

My own broad guideline: If it looks as if it was intended to sow terror and it shocks the conscience, whether it is planes flying into the World Trade Center, gunmen shooting up Mumbai, or a political killer in a little girl’s bedroom, I’d call it terrorism — by terrorists.

Let us hope that for the sake of truth, human rights, and accurate reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that Hoyt works to make his own guideline an organizational one. It should be clear to all that terrorism should never be judged by the purported legitimacy of its motives, which is relative to the observer, but by a uniformly and universally recognizable set of features.