What is terrorism?

By Deauwand Myers

Remember the good old days? Where you didn't have to take off your shoes or surrender your hand lotion when traveling by air? Remember how passing through airport security was once a brief encounter? I miss those days. After 9/11, we expect the long wait and the slow strip tease: no shoes, no belt, no jewelry, no jacket. Security agents may pat you down, spread your legs, pass a wand under here, over there.

In the last century or so, there are only a few people who have changed the very nature of our world: Stalin, Hitler, FDR, JFK, MLK, Reagan… and yes, Osama Bin Laden.

If you're my age or younger, our formative years onward have been a long security protocol. Explosions at the gate, bombs, terrorist networks are par for the course. Our vocabulary has changed: threat assessment, terror alert, Islamofascism, Islamophobia, jihadists, soft targets, metadata collection, lone wolves, terror cells, and suicide bombers.

Information: its collection, analysis and proper synthesis have proven the most important of tools in fighting terrorism (and making money).

Yet, if information is the most important commodity in contemporary society, our governments seem to lack a basic grasp of it. That is, what is terror, and how did we get here?

Post-colonial elites, and the nations they answered to (America and Western Europe) chose dictatorships and theocracies over democracy. Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Congo, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and a host of other nations were supported by Western powers wherein democratically-elected governments were violently supplanted, or autocratic, theocratic governments were supported.

For this article, let us focus on perhaps the most glaring example of American and Western European hypocrisy when it comes to "fighting terrorism": Saudi Arabia.

For generations, America and its European allies have supported the Saudi government: a theocratic monarchy ruled under Sharia law, a version of which is now deployed by the death cult known as ISIS. Beheadings, public beatings, stoning, relegation of women to second-class citizenship, and a long list of other barbaric practices constitute the governing philosophy of Saudi Arabia.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated by Saudi nationals. Eighteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi Arabian.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. American and European governments and their respective intelligence agencies have known for decades that the great wealth of Saudi Arabia is partially used to support madrasas and mosques teaching Wahhabism across the globe. Wahhabism, a fundamentalist, ultra-orthodox version of Sunni Islam, is the de facto underpinning of the politico-religious ideology of Islamic extremists around much of the world.

Wahhabism has enjoyed a durable relationship with the royal family of bin Saud, the rulers of Saudi Arabia (indeed, the country is named after the family's surname) for over 150 years. Wahhibism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia.

So why didn't America attack Saudi Arabia after 9/11? Why Iraq? Why is it that Western powers have winked and nodded at the House of Saud's fervent support of a poisonous, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic and exceedingly violent interpretation of Islam?

The short answer: oil, and they are our friends. Ridiculous.

I retell the House of Saud's politico-religious ideology for this reason: in truth, terrorism is what we say it is and where we say it comes from. There's no consistency. If Western powers were serious about this particular form of political speech, we'd have seriously engaged Saudi Arabia in renouncing their twisted theology, and certainly asked them to stop exporting it throughout the world.

Terrorism is using violence, or the threat of violence, to affect political or sociopolitical aims. By this definition, terrorism is not a new phenomenon. The Spanish Inquisition, the Atlantic Slave Trade, America's western expansion and near-total destruction of indigenous populations, Stalin's Purges, and the Christian pro-life fanatics who bomb, burn and assassinate doctors and abortion/women's reproductive health clinics, for example, would all be considered terrorism.

We sometimes call violent acts from American citizens directed at other Americans as "domestic terror," but never with the vigor and wall-to-wall news coverage we give terrorist acts perpetrated by people of the Islamic faith. Before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, terrorism in America has been perpetrated by Americans, usually white males, yet white men aren't profiled or covered in the same way as their Muslim counterparts.

As I said, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian, by the way, has changed the course of human history. Korea and Japan have employed the same counterterrorism measures as America, particularly at airports.

Hatred, emptiness, and the promise of eternal life are some of the constituents promulgating terrorism, Islamic and otherwise. As with all other branches of malefaction, these are within the human heart. Religion is simply a convenient and seductive avenue by which to express evil. Combating terrorism, then, is combating the darker parts of the human condition. Good luck with that.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.