Wars of Terror

Gabriele Marranci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000189469
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Social Sciences

Analyzing the role of rhetoric and ideology in the western 'war on terror' and Islamic 'jihad' in the aftermath of 9/11, Gabriele Marranci shows that we are not experiencing a 'clash of civilizations' but a clash among 'civilizers' who believe they have the power to define how to be human. Seeing themselves as 'under attack' from a globalizing world that threatens to dilute their identity and very existence, both sides employ a civilizational rhetoric to support its recourse to political violence. Examining why some individuals are radicalized to take violent action while the majority are not, the author compares the case of self-identified crusader Anders Breivik with an example from his own fieldwork. He shows that emotions such as indignation, sense of injustice and reaction to the killing of civilians play an important role in underpinning violent acts – as do the views presented by the 'civilizers' on the other side. Over time, this leads to ever-greater escalation as one side calls for more jihad and the other for greater anti-terrorism measures, drone attacks and bombings. Based on twelve years of research and fieldwork in western countries as well as South and Southeast Asia, Wars of Terror shows the impact labels, stigma, conspiracy theories and stereotypes have in maintaining this ongoing global conflict. A fascinating anthropological study which makes a vital contribution to our understanding of one of the most important issues of our time.

1 Introduction

27 December 1985: 8.14 am, Leonardo da Vinci – Fiumicino Airport outside Rome, Italy. People are queuing at the ticket counters of Israel’s El Al Airlines and Trans World Airlines – people who are ready for their holidays, business trips; some leaving home, others returning. There’s the usual chattering yawning and impatience. The clock marks 8.15 am. A shower of bullets, then an explosion, screams, blood and crying. Sixteen people are dead on the floor of the airport, ninety-nine are wounded, some fatally so. Among the dead lies an American diplomat named Wes Wessels. Three of the Palestinian terrorists were killed by the Italian police on the spot, and another would soon be arrested.

At 8.16 am on the same day, Schwechat airport, in Vienna, Austria, saw hand grenades thrown into crowds of passengers queuing to check in for a flight to Tel Aviv. Two innocent people were killed while thirty-nine were wounded. Overall, the two synchronized attacks claimed nineteen lives, including that of a child, and wounded more than 140 people. The coordinated terrorist attacks had the signature of Abu Nidal Organization, an extremely radical Palestinian group (Wege 1991).

A couple of months earlier, on 7 October 1985, four men declaring to be part of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) hijacked the MS Achille Lauro liner just off the Egyptian coast. The cruise destination was Ashdod, Israel. Before leaving the boat, they killed Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American man in a wheelchair, and threw his body overboard. He was killed because he was a Jew.

In September 1986, in Karachi, Pakistan, a Pan American World Airways Boeing 747-121, Flight 73, was preparing for take-off when four men armed with Kalashnikovs and explosives hijacked the aircraft. The terrorists, four Palestinian men of Abu Nidal, wanted the flight to take off, but the captain managed to escape from the aircraft, leaving them unable to accomplish their plans for a suicide attack – that of crashing the plane into a prominent target in Israel. Three hours into the ensuing standoff, to show that they were ‘serious’ terrorists, they killed a passenger, their first victim. Sixteen hours later, while negotiations were ongoing, the auxiliary power unit that powered the plane’s electrical system ran out, plunging the aircraft in darkness. Thinking that the Pakistani special forces were storming the aircraft, they ordered the passengers to go to the centre of the aircraft, whereupon they started to shoot and throw hand grenades at the passengers while screaming, ‘jihad!’ They killed twenty innocent passengers, of which twelve were from India and the rest from the United States, Pakistan and Mexico, and injured hundreds (Thexton 2006).

In October of the same year, a synagogue in the Karaköy quarter of Beyoğlu district, in Istanbul, Turkey, would see the first terrorist attack against a Jewish community since the formation of Turkey as a nation. Two gunmen, both Palestinians, opened fire during the Shabbat and killed twenty-two people – the Abu Nidal Organization appears to have carried out this attack too. A few years later, on the evening of 11 July 1988, the cruise ship City of Poros, carrying 400 passengers and seventy-one crew members, left the harbour. After the ship covered a few miles, at 8.30 pm, Palestinian gunmen, who had passed for tourists, opened fire with their automatic weapons and used grenades, killing nine tourists, fatally injuring two and severely injuring another ninety-eight. Abu Nidal, as usual, claimed responsibility for the action.

Pan Am Flight 103 was flying from Frankfurt to Detroit via London, when it exploded in the sky above the Scottish town of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, killing all 243 passengers and sixteen crew members. The burning plane would kill eleven more on the ground as it fell on residential areas of the town. In 2003 Muammar Gaddafi admitted Libya’s responsibility for the terrorist action and paid compensation to the victims ’ families, yet he denied being personally involved. Recently, the involvement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) has been suggested. The militant organization has been responsible for other plots and attacks.¹

In Algiers, Algeria, six years later, on 24 December 1994, a commando of Algerian terrorists – members of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) – hijacked Air France Flight 8969 at Houari Boumedienne Airport with only one intention: to blow up the plane over the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The pilot diverted the plane to Marseilles, where the French special operations unit GIGN stormed the aircraft and killed all four hijackers, who had, sadly, already killed three passengers. On 25 July 1995, a gas bottle exploded in the Saint-Michel station of ‘Line B’ of the Réseau Express Régional (RER, Paris regional train network). The terrorist action killed eight and wounded eighty. On 17 August, a bomb exploded at the Arc de Triomphe, wounding seventeen people. Nine days later, on 26 August, a large bomb was found, fortunately undetonated, on the railroad tracks of a high-speed rail line to Lyon; had the bomb exploded, it would have been one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in the history of France. Yet, this was not the only time that Parisians were lucky. On 3 September of that same year, a bomb planted in a Paris square malfunctioned as it detonated and wounded four people – if it were not for this malfunction, the explosion would have resulted in a big tragedy. Later, these attacks were linked to Khaled Kelkal, whom the French gendarmerie killed on 29 September in a controversial operation that was recorded and later broadcast on TV. Kelkal was a juvenile delinquent who had served time in prison. While serving his sentence, he not only became radicalized, but also started to recruit Muslims for the Algerian civil war. After leaving prison in 1993, he visited his family in Mostaganem, Algeria, and probably joined the GIA, for which he organized the terrorist operation in France described above. Kelkal’s death, however, did not stop the wave of Islamic terrorism ravaging France. On 6 October 1995, another gas bottle exploded in the Maison Blanche station of the Paris Métro, wounding thirteen, and on 17 October, a mere eleven days later, a gas bottle exploded between the Musée d’Orsay and Saint-Michel – Notre-Dame stations of RER ‘Line C’, wounding twenty-nine.

The next year, 1996, saw another series of attacks and plots, at least one of which was unsuccessful only by chance. These were organized by a new Islamic terrorist cell, which financed itself with a series of criminal endeavours – although most of these were intercepted by the police. Yet, on 28 March 1996, the group successfully parked a car with four gas tanks connected to a detonator next to a police station in Lille. The terrorist group had hoped to pulverize the entire building, but the bomb failed to explode in a big way and destroyed only the car. The attack occurred just two days before Lille hosted the G7 conference. Finally, the group was traced and the French anti-terrorist unit raided the house that it had operated from in spring 1996, when four members of the terrorist cell were killed; two had escaped and eventually found refuge in Bosnia. Apparently, this cell had the support of a very rich Saudi man whose family was very influential: Osama bin Laden.

*****

The accounts above summarize numerous instances of terrorist attacks and plots that were organized and executed by individuals and groups who identified themselves, and were identified by others, as Muslims. During the execution of the attacks, the perpetrators often uttered exclamations such as ‘Allahu Akbar’ or ‘Jihad!’. Never again would Europe experience such frequency and intensity of what was called ‘Islamic terrorism’. No politician, during those years, made any reference to ‘war’ or questioned the possibility that such actions may be a serious threat to the ‘Western civilization’. The public, the political world, and scholars and analysts interpreted those acts of violence not very differently from how they understood and dealt with both communistand fascist-inspired terrorism, which ravaged 1960s’–1980s’ Europe (Yonah and Pluchinsky 1992; Sprinzak 1995; Weinberg and Eubank 1988). Having asked the students in my courses, for the past three years, whether they knew of any of these terrorist actions or that so many terrorist attacks had taken place in Europe, I have noticed that only a few could mention, at the most, the Lockerbie bombing. For them, what has been labelled ‘Islamic terrorism’ is a new phenomenon that started with 9/11 and, with one man, Osama bin Laden.

Fast-forward to 11 September 2001 – the success of a plot, which terrorists for a long time had attempted to accomplish but for several lucky coincidences never achieved, would change world history. An aircraft was used as a missile against a Western target. Surely, this tragedy caused the highest loss of lives in a single day in the West due to a terrorist attack and, indeed, was the first attack on the United States since the attack on Pearl Harbor; this time, it was at the economic heart of the nation. Yet even such a devastating attack cannot completely explain the subsequent events, narratives and rhetoric which we today know as the War on Terror.

The War on Terror has marked the deepest changes in Western democratic countries since the end of the Second World War. Almost no aspect of ordinary life has been left unchanged: trade, transport and communications have suffered disruptions, in one way or another, as indeed have civil liberties (Shafir, Meade and Aceves 2012). Academics and human rights activists alike have highlighted the erosion of personal freedom and civil rights, as well as the demonization of communities, such as the Muslims, in particular, in the United States, Europe and Australia. Shafir et al. suggest in their analysis that, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration systematically created social panic through the emotive manipulation of the significance of the attacks and the power of al-Qaida and then, as we have witnessed in 2003, Saddam Hussein. In other words, what the Bush administration created and spread far beyond the United States is what Cohen has identified as ‘political moral panic’ (Cohen 2011). In a detailed study, Hetherington and Suhay (2011: 557) have shown that

when ordinary people perceive a grave threat to their safety, they are susceptible to adopting antidemocratic preferences regardless of whether they score high in authoritarianism. In this rendering, antidemocratic preferences can quickly become popular, mainstream positions under the right circumstances. Indeed, to a certain extent, this has been the experience in post-9/11 America, with support for preemptive war, torture, wiretapping without warrant, and the like sometimes enjoying majority support.

Others, such as most of the European nations and Australia, started to introduce controversial anti-terrorism legislations (Mcdonald 2005; Tufail and Poynting 2013). Terrorism per se, however, had little impact on everyday life, due to the rarity of attacks on Western metropolises, and when compared to previous waves of political and international terrorism (Merolla and Zechmeister 2009), the resulting changes to ‘our way of life’ were mainly political and introduced by the Western states themselves.

What has changed is that in the case of 9/11, the response to terrorism was not framed simply as a matter of dealing with criminality or terrorism, as in previous years, but rather has been developed through the concept of ‘war'. The conceptualization is not even metaphorical, but rather,

a real war waged on many fronts. … The characterisation of 9/11 as an act of war (rather than, as others have argued, a criminal act) and the response to terrorism as a ‘war on terror’ (rather than an investigation into terrorist crimes) is a discursive achievement. This achievement has naturalised one characterisation of 9/11 and America’s response to terrorism as the dominant way to talk about the issue. (Hodges and Nilep 2007: 23)

This dominance will continue in the years to come even if the rhetoric, for instance, of President Obama, may have changed, with, in some cases, the word ‘war’ dropped from politicians’ speeches concerning terrorism (McCrisken 2011; Pious 2011).

The use of the concept of ‘war’ is more than just a political narrative. In fact, it reveals a deeper discourse of values. The war is not against a state or even a rebellious group, and it is not even a ‘civil war’, despite the fact that the enemy is also represented as being ‘within’. In his speech following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, President Bush made it clear to his nation and the world that despite the attack being an act of war, no conventional war would be waged:

They were acts of war. This will require our country to unite in steadfast determination and resolve. Freedom and democracy are under attack. The American people need to know that we’re facing a different enemy than we have ever faced. This enemy hides in shadows, and has no regard for human life. This is an enemy who preys on innocent and unsuspecting people, then runs for cover. But it won’t be able to run for cover forever. This is an enemy that tries to hide. But it won’t be able to hide forever. This is an enemy that thinks its harbors are safe. But they won’t be safe forever. This enemy attacked not just our people, but all freedom-loving people everywhere in the world. (Bush 2001, September 12, quoted in Hodges and Nilep 2007: 25)

This, clearly, is a war in which values such as freedom, good, evil, justice, injustice and democracy and the dearest values derived from the Enlightenment are ‘at stake’. Yet, this war does not have a temporal frame of years, but, rather, of generations: ‘The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation’ (Bush 2004, 19 March, quoted in Hodges and Nilep 2007: 30). This is a clash where the people of this generation will have to make themselves afraid for the good of humanity and civilization: ‘We’re on the offensive, we will not rest, we will not retreat, and we will not withdraw from the fight until this threat to civilization has been removed’ (Bush 2006, 5 September, quoted in Hodges and Nilep 2007: 33).

Bush and his administration set the tone for an increasingly vivid narrative of civilizational clash, and other politicians would soon follow such rhetoric – from Tony Blair to Silvio Berlusconi to John Howard, as we shall see in Chapter 2. The war was seen as a civilizational war, and one that may decide the fate of the democratic West. This civilizational narrative was repeated in newspapers, TV talk shows, websites of different kinds and in popular books (Croft 2006; Holloway 2008). One of the most popular books that reacted to the events of 9/11 was The Rage and the Pride, which sought to be ‘a j’accuse … a prosecution or sermon addressed to Europeans. [It was] an unrestrainable cry’ (Fallaci 2002: 21) and sold over one million copies in Italy alone, and topped the bestseller list for several months, even surpassing books such as The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series.² Fallaci, despite being disliked by intellectuals and academics for her demonization of Muslims and Islam, was able to resonate with many men and women in Western capitals for whom the catchphrase ‘Bush’s War on Terror’ had become ‘common sense’. Fallaci expressed in her book the fears that are at the heart of the War on Terror and, at the same time, that feeling of rediscovering a ‘civilizational pride’ that after 9/11 was rapidly spreading as much as the fear of Muslims and the hatred of Islam. Her words, in The Rage and the Pride, are clear and dramatic:

You don’t understand, you don’t want to understand, that a Reverse Crusade is underway. A war of religion they call Holy War, Jihad. You don’t understand, you don’t want to understand, that for those Reverse Crusaders the West is a world to conquer and subjugate to Islam. (Fallaci 2002: 27)

A man in an orange boiler suit kneels, while another man, in black ‘ninja-style’ clothes with a knife in his hand, stands close by. The orange suit resembles those that detainees wear in Guantanamo, and just like those men, the one on his knees is a prisoner too. His name is James Foley and he had been held captive for two years in Syria before mysteriously ending up in IS’s murderous hands (Islamic State, formerly ISIS). In a barbaric ritual seen repeatedly in al-Qaida videos, the journalist and video reporter Foley blames, in his final words, the United States for having ‘signed’ his ‘death certificate’. Then, before the knife reaches Foley’s throat, the executioner addresses the United States and, with it, the entire West, in crisp British-accented words:

You are no longer fighting an insurgency; we are an Islamic Army and a state that has been accepted by a large number of Muslims worldwide, so effectively, any aggression towards the Islamic State is an aggression towards Muslims from all walks of life who have accepted Islamic Caliphate as their leadership. So any attempt by you, Obama, to deny the Muslims their right of living in safety under the Islamic Caliphate will result in the bloodshed of your people.³

Foley’s beheading shocked Western audiences, both Muslim and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The concept of civilization: From abstraction to a new common sense
• 3 Labels, stigmas and ethos
• 4 Occidentalism, conspiracism and jahiliyya: Rhetoric of civilizational discourses
• 5 'Your women are oppressed, but ours are awesome': Civilizers and gender
• 6 Drones, jihad arid justice
• 7 Conclusion - Defining the human
• References
• Index