Terrorcraft: empire and the making of the racialised terrorist threat

Terrorcraft

Terrorcraft draws from Barbara and Karen Fields’ notion of ‘racecraft’. ¹⁶ Racecraft sets out to debunk the notion that such a thing as ‘race’ exists outside practices of racism. The Fields write that ‘Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once.’ While ‘Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race’ this is a ‘sleight of hand’ they argue, as it ‘transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is.’ ¹⁷ Such an understanding stands in contrast to much of race scholarship which tends, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued, to focus on the ideological production of races rather than the structural conditions of racism. ¹⁸ As the Fields put it: ‘historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations – as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy [as ideology] rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco’. ¹⁹ Thus, they insist that it is necessary to examine the specific political and economic contexts that give rise to particular racial projects.

To be sure, projects of racial formation build on precursors. Indigenous studies scholar Patrick Wolfe argues that

European xenophobic traditions such as Judeophobia, Islamophobia or Negrophobia are considerably older than race. Though most if not all of its ingredients can be found in earlier classifications, race itself is a distinctive configuration of ideological elements that we do not find configured in this way before the late eighteenth century. ²⁰

The onus then is to explain how race manifests itself both ideologically and materially from then on and why. Wolfe argues that race is ‘a process, not an ontology’. ²¹ A. Sivanandan similarly notes that racism ‘does not stay still; it changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function – with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system and, above all, the challenges, the resistances to that system’. ²² To state that race is socially constructed only gets us so far, Wolfe adds. What is important is how races are ‘constructed, under what circumstances, and in whose interests’. ²³

My focus here then is on the terrorist racial project, a product of empire, which I contend sets the context for how racialised groups are treated in a society. ²⁴ I use the term ‘terrorcraft’ to refer to this project of racialisation.

Terrorcraft is a process. It consists of evolving state policies and ideologies. The security state is an essential actor in the creation of a racialised terrorist subject through practices of racial profiling. Terrorcraft incorporates ‘statecraft’ and the security practices that inform racialisation. As mentioned above, it draws on Fields and Fields’ notion of ‘racecraft’, and their insistence that races are produced through racism just as witches are produced through witchcraft. Races do not pre-exist practices of exploitation and expropriation even if racial projects draw on precursors. However, terrorcraft is different from racecraft in that terrorists are not fictitious constructions in the way witches are for the Fields. Arabs and Muslims who turn to political violence and target civilians are real, even if ‘terrorism’ and who is labelled a terrorist are themselves politically motivated constructions. What witchcraft and terrorcraft have in common is that they are processes by which threats to the socio-economic system – be they witches or terrorists – are created as a means to enforce social control. ²⁵ What terrorcraft sets out to capture is how brown men (and it is still primarily men) come to embody terrorism, even though the number of Muslims in the West who engage in political violence is miniscule, less than one in one million per year according to one comprehensive study. ²⁶ Finally, terrorcraft as an ideology is sustained through ritualistic repetition, in ways that the Fields talk about racecraft. As Fields and Fields put it:

[o]ur analysis of racecraft lays out various mechanisms by which an ideology takes on the appearance of uncontroversial everyday reality – universally understood as rituals regarding deference and consumption, self-confirming enactment in practical activities of all kinds, and continuously renewed barriers against the everyday flow of refuting evidence. ²⁷

Terrorcraft as ideology is reinforced through rituals such as the ‘see something, say something’ campaign in its ubiquitous staging in public spaces and through 24/7 news media coverage of every attack carried out on western targets. ²⁸ Such constant reminders in public spaces and the repetitive production and consumption of terrorism news foster a climate where terrorism is viewed as a greater threat than it actually is. A number of scholars, including former counter-terrorism specialists, have debunked the state’s over-inflated projection of the threat of ‘Jihadi terrorism’. ²⁹ Yet, such ‘refuting evidence’, as the Fields note, has no significant impact. Media personalities, such as Peter Bergen, a journalist and national security analyst, have stressed the greater number of deaths attributable to the white far Right. ³⁰ Yet, even when it comes from mainstream figures, such evidence does little to alter the dominant ideology and a reified ‘Muslimness’ that sustains the war on terror. Furthermore, the number of deaths in the US due to Jihadi terrorism after 9/11 is 107, ³¹ a figure that is dwarfed by gun deaths during that same period or the hundreds of thousands killed in the US’s war on terror. ³² Terrorcraft as ideology centres Arab/Muslim/South Asian violence, bypasses the violence of the white far Right, and erects formidable barriers to the equation of imperial violence with state terror. In what follows, I examine the genesis of terrorcraft in the US.

Imperial context

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the so-called ‘golden age’ of the US economy and the apogee of US global hegemony, all conventional measures of prosperity were high. By the mid-1960s, however, the economy was showing clear signs of strain, most notably in the form of falling profitability ³³ and a declining share of world trade. ³⁴ In the latter half of the decade, moreover, fiscal deficits exploded under the burden of the Vietnam war. By the early 1970s, the economy was unmistakably in crisis. In 1971, Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods agreement by ending the convertibility of the dollar, and in 1973, following the second Arab-Israeli war, the US suffered the first of two major oil shocks that decade. By 1975, New York City suffered its now famous fiscal crisis, marking the rise of the age of austerity. ³⁵

Under these rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, capital set about its search for strategies to restore profitability. It is no coincidence that the ideas of economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman became fashionable when the last attempts to restore profitability through Keynesian government-led expenditure failed. The ensuing neoliberal model, first implemented in Chile after the 1973 coup, then set the stage for a new era of capitalist renewal. It rested on authoritarian mechanisms to manage dissent. ³⁶ The neoliberal carceral state emerged out of this context even while its roots go back to the Truman era. ³⁷ Building on the pioneering work of scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jordan Camp contends that this state emerged not only as a response to the class and race struggles of the late 1960s, but also as a reflection of the Cold War consensus around the centrality of security in matters of statecraft. ³⁸

This security logic rested on the assumption that order was a necessary pre-condition for capitalism to thrive both domestically and globally. Modernisation programmes in the ‘developing world’ and the War on Poverty at home both relied on the intersection of economic development with security. W. W. Rostow, the eminent economist and national security advisor to Johnson, put it succinctly to Johnson in 1967 when he said: ‘I was much struck by the parallels between your formulation of domestic policy and those you have applied to foreign policy. At home your appeal is for law and order as the framework for economic and social progress. Abroad we fight in Vietnam . . . [to] build a future of economic and social progress.’ ³⁹ Thus, developmentalism, policing and militarism became pillars for the advancement of capitalism and the restoration of a US-led global imperial order. This was the context for the rise of counter-insurgency doctrine, which rested on development plus force. ⁴⁰ As one expert put it, counter-insurgency is ‘armed social work’. ⁴¹

Resistance to this order was organised by anti-colonial and anti-imperial forces in countries in the Global South, and by social movements domestically. From the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the anti-Vietnam War movement, US domestic and foreign policy was called into question. These movements took a radical turn in the mid-1960s. As Gilmore explains, from the LA Watts uprising onwards radical,

Black, Brown, Yellow and Red Power movements fought the ways the state organized poor peoples’ perpetual dispossession in service to capital. Radical white activists, students, wage workers, welfare rights agitators added to domestic disorders by aligning with people of color: they also launched autonomous attacks against symbols and strongholds of US capitalism and Euro-American racism and imperialism. ⁴²

In 1975, Samuel Huntington, drawing the lessons for the elite of these movements, would decry the ‘excess of democracy’, arguing that if the US could not control its domestic populations it would not be able to retain its status as the pre-eminent ‘hegemonic power in a system of world order’. ⁴³ The Trilateral Commission, an instrument of the liberal elite, which published Huntington’s essay, set out to address what it termed the ‘crisis of democracy’ by forming a global alliance of nations in North America, Western Europe and with Japan.

The solution to the crisis involved intervention into various spheres of social and political life. One dimension was the use of counter-insurgency methods to suppress dissent. The US’s expanded policing capacities around the world coincided with incarceration domestically. As Stuart Schrader shows, the security experts who developed counter-insurgency doctrine and practices did so by drawing initially on insights from domestic cases, which they then applied abroad, learning lessons that were subsequently brought back home. ⁴⁴ Saigon and Los Angeles were but two points in an emerging global grand strategy designed to restore order and US economic and military hegemony.

In their now classic analysis, Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and his co-authors first identified the turn towards an ‘exceptional state’ and the use of racism as a means to address structural crises. In the UK, black youth were criminalised and a moral panic generated around black ‘mugging’. Despite the lack of any real uptick in the type of crime called mugging, this new racial project became the pretext to enact authoritarian solutions and legitimate draconian policing. As they state, ‘[p]olicing the blacks’ became ‘for all practical purposes, synonymous with the wider problem of policing the crisis’. ⁴⁵ And, if ‘mugging’ came to the UK from the US, ‘fully thematised and contextualized’ and ‘embedded in a number of linked frames’, ⁴⁶ ‘terrorism’ in its particular racialised form of ‘Arab terrorism’ and later ‘Islamic terrorism’ came to the US as a collaborative project between conservatives in Israel and the US. Together with urban crime, riots, feminist agitation, and anti-war protests, terrorism became part of a generalised moral panic that the national security state needed to subdue in order to restore order, the stability of capitalism and global imperial dominance.

The MENA region

US interests in the MENA region centre on control of the region’s vast energy resources. As President Truman put it in 1946, the ‘Near and Middle East . . . contains vast natural resources . . . lies across the most convenient route of land, air and water communication. . .[and] might become an arena of intense rivalry among outside powers’. ⁴⁷ To safeguard its interests, ensure the steady flow of cheap oil to Europe, and to quell the perceived threat from the Soviet Union, the US cultivated relationships with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other nations.

At first, Israel was not part of US plans and the relationship between the two countries was ‘decidedly uneasy’, Noam Chomsky suggests. ⁴⁸ In the early 1950s, the US developed ties with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who, for a time, had CIA support. Chomsky alleges that Israel ‘organized terrorist cells within Egypt to carry out attacks on US installations’ in an effort to drive a wedge between Egypt and the US. ⁴⁹ This would not yield results. However, as the US relationship with Egypt deteriorated, it began to view Israel as a ‘strategic asset’ and a key barrier against Arab nationalism. Nasserism and pan-Arab unity posed a serious threat to US hegemony. If Egypt were to succeed in bringing together the technologically advanced Arab states with the oil-producing countries, it would severely hamper US designs. Thus, after a period of trying to cultivate closer ties to Nasser, even opposing the French, British and Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, the US shifted to a position where Arab nationalists were viewed as enemies who had to be squashed by any means necessary. ⁵⁰ This was the context for the othering of Arab Americans, as Arab American Studies scholars have argued. ⁵¹ It was also the start of the US’s strategic partnership with Israel.

In a matter of six days in 1967, Israel crippled the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian militaries. This military victory demonstrated to the US the value of Israel as an effective means of keeping Arab nationalism in check. The new US-Israeli alliance was in step with the Nixon doctrine, a policy of reliance on proxies to advance US geostrategic goals that established the basis for US withdrawal from Vietnam. US aid to Israel increased dramatically. Between 1949 and 1965, Israel received on average about $63 million per year. This increased to $102 million per year until 1970, and then to $1 billion for the next five years after that. ⁵²

The oil embargo of 1973, as stated above, exacerbated the crisis in the US. Led by the Left-leaning nations in the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, it dealt a blow to the postwar imperial order set by the US as the traditional dependence of the Global South on the North was, for a time, reversed. The US’s vast energy needs threatened to weaken its hegemony and policy-makers worried that this shift of power to the East could open the door to Soviet influence. The quest by formerly colonised oil producing countries for equality threatened the balance of global power. ⁵³ The strategic alliance with Israel became even more important.

The late 1960s and 1970s set a context, Chomsky argues, in which criticism of Israel began to be shut down inside the US, although Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 did open up a period of criticism per Amy Kaplan. ⁵⁴ The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Chomsky suggests, maligned critics of Israel by distributing false information about them. ⁵⁵ A CIA study found that Israeli intelligence played a part in vilification campaigns, noting that in order to silence critics of Israel in the West, ‘sabotage, paramilitary and psychological warfare projects, such as character assassination and black propaganda’ were used. ⁵⁶ The ‘Arab terrorist’ was developed in this context and marks the beginning of the racialisation of Arab Americans by the national security state.

The practice of terrorcraft

Even before this particular form of racialisation, Arab immigrants to the US, particularly those who were working-class, poor or of darker complexion, faced discrimination. The largest group of Arab immigrants to the US at the turn of the nineteenth century were Syrian Christians. Working-class Syrians were seen as ‘dirty’, while their upper class counterparts were more easily accepted. ⁵⁷ Sarah Gualtieri shows that Syrian immigrants occupied an ‘in between’ space. This parallels the experience of the tens of million Southern and Eastern European immigrants who also entered the US in the same period. David Roediger’s analysis of these groups shows that they were at first racialised but, after the second world war, accepted into whiteness. The case for Muslim Arabs was more complicated. As Gualtieri notes, ‘Muslim whiteness was never as stable as Christian Arab whiteness’. ⁵⁸ However, Arab American Studies scholars contend that Arabs were largely integrated in the postwar period. Elaine Hagopian states that Arab Americans were one of the ‘most successful case[s] of assimilation in American society’. ⁵⁹ Had it not been for certain political and economic events, Alixa Naff argues, ‘Syrian-Americans might have Americanized themselves out of existence’. ⁶⁰ But the rise of Arab nationalism and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war were events that would shape the consciousness of Syrians and other Arab immigrants and help to coalesce an Arab American identity. ⁶¹

The new wave of immigration in the post-1945 period, which included Arabs from other parts of the Middle East such as Palestine, brought with it a commitment to pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism. It is this generation that formed the core of the activist Arab American population in the US. ⁶² 1967 was pivotal in spurring this activism and in coalescing Arab American identity. ⁶³ Months after the June war, the Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) and the Organization of Arab Students (OAS), among other groups, were formed. ⁶⁴ As Michael Suleiman notes, Arabs in the US ‘deeply resented the extreme partisanship America and Americans (especially the US government and people) showed toward Israel and the occasional hostility toward Arabs’. ⁶⁵ Kaplan writes that after 1967, ‘Americans en masse fell in love with Israel’. ⁶⁶

Occurring as it did in the context of the rise of dissent at home and rapidly escalating conflict in the Middle East, the emergence of these new Arab American activists was viewed as threatening to US interests in the region. The particular threat they posed was not only their opposition to Israeli policies, but also their knowledge of the region that contradicted US official narratives. For instance, propaganda about Nasserism and pan-Arab nationalism was easily debunked by activist students who were from these countries. More significantly, these newly formed Arab American political organisations posed a risk in terms of their potential to turn public opinion against US policy in the Middle East. Counter-insurgency theory stresses that both insurgents and counterinsurgents vie for public support to succeed. As Laleh Khalili writes, the ‘population is the prize’, ⁶⁷ while Schrader contends that the ‘fear of losing mass loyalty’ is a central ‘characteristic of US counter-insurgency theory’. ⁶⁸ This meant that it was necessary to identify existing and emergent threats and neutralise or pacify them. The Arab American Left presented such a threat.

Additionally, 1968 marked the highpoint of the anti-Vietnam War movement, a development that contributed to the defeat of the US in East Asia. The security state could not risk a similar development in the MENA region. The Arab American threat became more potent as these groups integrated into the US and global anti-imperialist Left. ⁶⁹ Black radical groups like the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers unequivocally condemned Israel after the 1967 war and developed relationships with Arab American groups. Arab Americans were also part of the milieu of radical black working-class community and labour organising in Dearborn, Michigan. ⁷⁰ It is this pro-Palestinian, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist organising that precipitated state-led programmes to racially profile, and, in the process, racialise Arab Americans.

The national security state’s crafting of Arab American activists, particularly students, as ‘terrorists’ began after 1967. ⁷¹ Terrorcraft thus has a particular moment of origin as a practice of racial profiling and targeting, one that its victims bear witness to. Nadine Naber’s study of 1960s San Francisco activists, for example, shows that there was a consciousness that speaking out on behalf of Palestine meant becoming ‘enemies within’ the US. ⁷² The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the ADL increasingly scrutinised Arab activists on college campuses, arguing that these students were connected to Palestinian terrorist groups or unfriendly Arab governments, and called upon law enforcement agencies to investigate them. ⁷³ As Pamela Pennock states, suspicion of Arab American students was heightened after Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy in 1968. Gerald Ford insisted that the government monitor all Arab students in the US, she adds, while ADL played up the OAS’s connections to the Black Panther Party and the Socialist Workers Party in order to cast them as part of the overall threat facing US hegemony. ⁷⁴ Heeding these calls, the FBI and CIA began to investigate student groups, treating them as ‘potential terrorists’. ‘Potential’ because both the CIA and FBI did not find actual evidence of terrorist activity, Pennock notes. It is important to stress here that AIPAC and ADL were successful in their aims because their arguments found fertile ground within the counter-insurgency policing practices of the national security state. The crafting of Arab Americans as ‘terrorists’ was part of a global strategy of counter-insurgency that aimed to pacify resistance before it could erupt, and Israel, after 1967, was a partner in this strategy.

Munich 1972 and Operation Boulder

If racial profiling of Arab Americans had its origins in the late 1960s, it was systematised after the 1972 Munich incident. At the Munich Olympics, members of the Palestinian group Black September took Israeli athletes hostage and, in the context of a failed rescue attempt, murdered all of them. The gruesome turn of events was widely covered by the media and viewed by an estimated 900 million people around the world. ⁷⁵ Even though there were a number of hijackings and other serious incidents of political violence in the years immediately prior to it, Munich became, as Lisa Stampnitzky argues, ‘the spectacular event’ in histories written about modern terrorism. ⁷⁶ The Nixon administration set up the first US government body charged with focusing on terrorism, the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism (CCCT). The CCCT directed the FBI, the State Department, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to enact ‘special measures’ to monitor all Arab Americans − citizens and non-residents. ⁷⁷

Additionally, Jewish leaders and organisations were afforded protection from possible attacks, writes Pennock. To the security establishment, Munich demonstrated the ‘potential’ that Arab Americans possessed for terrorism in general and attacks on Jews in particular. This stands in stark contrast to the state’s reaction to ‘white’ political violence, producing neither broad racial generalisations about the proclivity of whites for violence nor the development of systems aimed at racially profiling all whites. Thus, the violence of a small number of Palestinians in Munich furnished the grounds from which to racially profile all Arab Americans. An essentialised and racialised Arab other was created through coercive state policies.

Operation Boulder, a system of visa checking to screen the applications of ‘potential terrorists’ from Arab nations, was launched after Munich. ⁷⁸ It drew on the FBI’s infamous counter-intelligence programme or COINTELPRO (1956–1971), ⁷⁹ which targeted the New Left and activists in the civil rights, Black Power, American Indian, Puerto Rican, feminist, anti-war and other movements. Although officially terminated in 1971, COINTELPRO lived on in programmes of widespread surveillance of all people of Arab parentage or ancestry, using the same methods that had been applied to civil rights movement leaders, such as wiretapping. COINTELPRO was modelled on counter-insurgency programmes abroad and was an integral part of the national security state’s efforts to maintain dominance internationally and domestically. Tying together empire abroad and at home, James Baldwin observed that the ‘Panthers thus became the native Vietcong’ and ‘the ghetto became the village in which the Vietcong was hidden, and in the ensuing search-and-destroy operations, everyone in the village became suspect’. ⁸⁰ The same fate befell Arab Americans after 1972. The ‘Arab terrorist’ was developed at this point and the work of terrorcraft had begun in earnest.

The goal of Operation Boulder was to intimidate, harass and ultimately silence Arab Americans critical of US foreign policy. ⁸¹ When INS agents set out to check the visa status of Arab students, the agents’ unstated goal was to determine their political views. By 1973, of the thousands of students screened, not one was charged with terrorism. Instead, many were deported for having worked without permission. ⁸² As Susan Akram writes, ‘[l]ater investigations, both by the press and by organizations in the Arab-American community, confirmed that “Operation Boulder” was initiated as a result of pressure from Zionist groups both within the US and from Israel to silence Arab-Americans from voicing opposition to US and Israeli policy in the Middle East’. ⁸³ I would refine this assessment and argue that Israel and domestic Zionist groups were successful in their aims because they found partners within the national security state due to the dominance of counter-insurgency security practices. The state produced a racialised ‘other’ through practices of surveillance, visa checking, interviews and intimidation as a way to quell a threat that could potentially destabilise US interventions in the MENA region. Operation Boulder was officially ended in 1975. However, surveillance programmes did not end, as seen for instance in the FBI’s Operation Vulgar Betrayal launched in the 1990s that targeted Muslim and Arab Americans for supposedly funding terrorist organisations in the MENA region. ⁸⁴

What is significant is that, even before there was a popular association between Arabs and terrorism, the state had produced a racialised terrorist and acted upon such a threat construction. ⁸⁵ In the 1970s, there was no consensus around the term terrorism in the US, much less an exclusive association of Arabs with terrorism. An analysis of the speeches of Presidents in the four decades prior to the 1970s shows that the terms ‘terrorism’ or ‘terrorist’ were rarely used, and when they were, they were not consistently applied to any set of actors. ⁸⁶ While such acts as the hijacking of US planes or kidnapping did occur prior to the 1970s, the people responsible were not called terrorists, and the acts themselves were not consistently labelled as terrorism. Instead the actors were called ‘bandits, rebels, guerillas, or later, urban guerrillas, revolutionaries, or insurgents’. ⁸⁷ As late as 1968 hijacking was referred to as ‘air piracy’ and treated as a routine domestic criminal matter according to Timothy Naftali. ⁸⁸ Nixon referred to the Palestinians in Munich as ‘outlaws’. ⁸⁹

At the first State Department conference on terrorism in 1972 after Munich, there was widespread agreement that terrorism was a tactic used by all ethnic and political groups and by both governments and non-state actors. By 1976, however, this position had changed, with non-state actors becoming the key forces identified as terrorist. ⁹⁰ Naftali states that in 1972, administration ‘documents still referred to members of the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] as “guerrilla” or the “Fedayeen”’. He adds that ‘the terms international terrorist and international terrorism did not yet appear in high-level documents or in national consciousness’. ⁹¹ Terrorism as a state discourse, referring to particular actors and actions, was still emerging. The media too did not cover terrorism in any systematic way. In fact, the New York Times did not index ‘terrorism’ as a significant category until 1972. ⁹² And while the term was used in the context of the Vietnam War in presidential speech, it had yet to become part of popular discourse. ⁹³

Terrorcraft as ideology

Munich was the turning point in the discussion of terrorism and marked the start of sustained media coverage. Kaplan argues that the New York Times covered the Munich massacre as a criminal act intended to disrupt civilised relations between nations; newspaper editorials cast the massacre as ‘an attack on civilization itself’. ⁹⁴ However, she adds that given US carnage in Vietnam, ‘the border between civilization and barbarism was ambiguous’. ⁹⁵ Research by Ghareeb and others suggests that Munich compounded the negative portrayal of Arabs in the media, particularly tropes of primitiveness, which was contrasted with a positive image of Israel post-1967. ⁹⁶ While these and earlier racist caricatures likely informed the new terrorist racial project, the notion of Arab as terrorists had not been fully conceptualised. In this section, I focus on the news media to show how terrorcraft as an ideological project was at an incipient stage in the 1970s.

As the 1970s wore on, the language of terrorism evolved and became part of the national dialogue. Television played a pivotal role in this development. ⁹⁷ At the time, the key source of news and the most significant media outlets were the three corporate television networks, ABC, NBC and CBS. ⁹⁸ Michael Delli Carpini and Bruce Williams’ empirical analysis of all network news stories between 1969 and 1980 found that there was at least one story every month on international terrorism. While this level of attention is far less than during the post-9/11 period, it was nevertheless an indication that the topic had become part of regular news routines. According to Edward Herman, moreover, the coverage was in line with US foreign policy objectives. Thus, while the networks downplayed the political violence perpetrated by US allies, they highlighted violent acts committed by US adversaries. They also largely ignored state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism by the US and its allies. ⁹⁹ Delli Carpini and Williams demonstrate that Latin America was under-covered. On the other hand, the Middle East was over-covered. The authors studied airtime devoted to geographic areas in comparison to actual events and reported that coverage of the Middle East was the most distorted particularly in the latter part of the decade. The Iran hostage crisis 1979–1981 (see below) was given tremendous airtime. This fits with another pattern, that of over-covering North America. Put together, the authors noted that by ‘over-covering acts aimed at private citizens, television news presents a picture of the average American as victim and of terrorism as more irrational and less explicable than may be the actual case’. ¹⁰⁰ If Munich put terrorism on the radar, the Iran hostage crisis took it to a whole new level. Both victim and perpetrator were beginning to be crystallised in this developing narrative.

The Iran hostage crisis was the next watershed moment after Munich in the development of terrorcraft. Iranian students took personnel at the US embassy hostage and held them for 444 days until January 1981. Melani McAlister argues this crisis gave expression to the language of Islam and terrorism. It was one of the most widely covered television news stories in US history and would educate Americans on a daily basis about how to think about Iran, Islam and terrorism. McAlister notes that ABC took the lead, broadcasting directly from Tehran and that their hour-long specials ‘went on to showcase the images and themes that would soon become nightly rituals: Iranians marching in the streets, US flags burning, tearful interviews with families of the hostages, a concerned president considering various diplomatic and/or military options, and interviews with angry US citizens’. ¹⁰¹ She adds that a national narrative of victimisation bolstered the militaristic posture of the Reagan administration and provided grounds for the first war on terror in the 1980s.

If Iran created the framework, other attacks on US targets through the 1980s reinforced the notion that terrorists were Arab or Muslim. Television covered these attacks as they made for high ratings. The routinised production and consumption of visually dramatic stories on terrorism played the role of a ritual. As scholars have argued, rituals serve to entrench ideologies. ¹⁰² For instance, annual 4 July celebrations bolster US nationalism. Regular terrorist attacks on US targets by MENA actors and the media attention paid to them play a similar role. With each attack, the ideology of terrorcraft was further developed and entrenched. 9/11 served as the culmination of this ideology in process.

But, I contend that terrorcraft as ideology did not materialise in one fell swoop, with one clear line of development. As Sivanandan notes, resistance and challenges also shape how racist ideologies fare. Too often scholars see turning points such as the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, Munich or the Iran hostage crisis as having ushered in new eras seemingly devoid of contradictions. My analysis of the New York Times’ coverage of terrorists reveals a less clear-cut and more complicated evolution of terrorcraft. ¹⁰³ The Times was selected for this analysis because it is acknowledged by media scholars to be the trend-setting newspaper with significant influence on how local newspapers cover an issue. I studied hundreds of articles with the word ‘terrorist’ in the headline between 1972 and 1991. ¹⁰⁴ The analysis shows that a wide range of actors such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the German Red Army Faction also known as the Baader Meinhof gang, the Italian Red Brigades, Palestinian groups, as well as groups and individuals from Japan, Israel, Spain, Holland and several Latin American countries were labelled as terrorist. In the 1970s, almost all the actors were leftwing groups and/or those dedicated to national liberation projects and routinely identified as ‘guerrillas’ or ‘leftist terrorists’. There is not a single mention of ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islamic’ terrorists before the 1979 Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis.

Since 1972 was the year that the New York Times first indexed terrorism, I expanded the search and studied all articles with the term ‘terrorist’ anywhere in the body of the text during that year. Analysis of the results are consistent with that of headline stories. Before Munich, the Irish were the most covered group. Of the eight front-page articles with the term ‘terrorist’ in the headline, not one referred to Arabs or Palestinians. Of the stories on Israel, nine were about a Japanese man who carried out an attack and only two were about Arabs or the PFLP. After Munich, there is a much greater focus on Arabs and Palestinians. Five front-page articles refer to either Palestinian or Arab terrorists, with a total of thirteen articles on Arab terrorists. In line with Naftali’s analysis of state documents, these actors are referred to as ‘guerillas’ more often than not. Also of note, the Israeli Irgun and other pro-Israel paramilitary forces were also labelled as terrorists. As stated above, the consensus among terrorism scholars at the 1972 State Department conference was that terrorism was a tactic used by a variety of groups and state actors. It therefore appears that the Times’ coverage reflected the general political climate of the time.

Arabs as terrorists made a significant entrance after Munich. For the next two years, Arabs were featured as terrorists more often than any other group. However, the coverage subsequently looked more like the pre-Munich era. In 1975, the most covered actors were from Holland, Spain and Ireland. In 1976, it was domestic groups in the US that received the most attention and in 1977 Germany was the focus of a whopping forty-six stories primarily about the Baader Meinhof gang. Unlike television, Arabs and Palestinians no longer had a prominent place in the Times. Instead, a range of actors from Europe, Latin America and sometimes Asia were labelled terrorist. Domestically, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Puerto Rican group, FALN, received the most attention. There are no headline articles of Arab Americans as terrorists and only two stories in all about Operation Boulder between 1972 and 1975. The Arab terrorist as a figure did not inspire the same kind of moral panic as the black mugger had in the UK. Instead, as stated above, Arab Americans were one among many threats and part of a generalised moral panic about leftists. The terrorist throughout the 1970s was a global figure, predominantly leftist, and often white.

However, an incipient form of terrorcraft was developing, particularly in stories about Israel. As the decade progressed, even the limited discussion of Israeli terrorism came to an end. By 1979, the ten articles about terrorism in Israel depicted only Palestinians as terrorists. Conforming to Israeli practice, the articles defined the violent political actions of Palestinians as ‘terrorism’, while casting those of the Israeli state as merely ‘retaliation’, rather than state terrorism. Terrorcraft as an ideology focusing on Arabs while eschewing state terrorism was in development. Joel Beinin questions whether the term ‘terror’ is useful in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, given that ‘both Arabs and Jews have employed several types of violence against civilians’. ¹⁰⁵ He argues that the ‘principal issue in Israel and Palestine is not terrorism in the abstract, but the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli occupation and Israel’s refusal to permit the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state’. ¹⁰⁶ He adds that the settler-colonial project, as well as resistance to it, are marked by the kind of violence that the term ‘terrorism’ misses or obscures. This ambiguity and the increasing political salience of the word ‘terrorist’ was perhaps what prompted the then former Israeli Defense Force captain Benjamin Netanyahu to organise two important international conferences.

The Jonathan Institute conferences

The Jonathan Institute, established in Israel in 1976, was named after Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, who died in the hostage rescue operation at the Entebbe airport in Uganda. The successful rescue mission boosted Israel’s image in the US. ¹⁰⁷ Subsequently, Netanyahu organised two pivotal international conferences on terrorism, one in 1979 in Jerusalem and the other in 1984 in Washington DC. In the opening speech of the conference, Netanyahu’s father Benzion Netanyahu stated that its goal was to ‘serve as the beginning of a new process − the process of rallying the democracies of the world to struggle against terrorism and the dangers it represents’. ¹⁰⁸ This ‘new process’ was arguably an attempt to counter existing global opinion, in particular the UN General Assembly’s approach to the question. As Benjamin Netanyahu notes in the foreword to the volume based on the conference proceedings, the ‘United Nations has proven itself to be hopelessly incapable of dealing with the problem [of terrorism]’. ¹⁰⁹

After the Munich massacre, the UN General Assembly called a special meeting to discuss terrorism. At this meeting, states of the Global South, both non-aligned and aligned with the Soviet Union, argued that the struggle for self-determination was justified, even if the taking of innocent lives was not. Not surprisingly, many of the newly decolonised nations not only championed self-determination but also condemned colonial violence. Significantly, resolution 3034 denounced the violence of ‘colonial’ and ‘racist powers’ against national liberation movements, calling such violence ‘terrorist’. ¹¹⁰ Thus, state terrorism was named and castigated. Resolution 3034 passed despite strong objection from western states. ¹¹¹ In 1973, resolution 3070 reaffirmed the ‘legitimacy of the peoples’ struggle for liberation from colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation by all available means, including armed struggle (my italics)’. ¹¹² In 1974, Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), was invited to address the General Assembly. He was the first representative of a non-member group to achieve such a distinction and, after his speech, the PLO was given observer status. The Palestinian right to self-determination was recognised and elevated by the UN. In 1977, the use of armed struggle in self-determination was included as a protocol in the Geneva Convention. ¹¹³

It is perhaps for these reasons that Netanyahu characterised the UN as being ‘incapable’ of dealing with terrorism. For Netanyahu the UN’s ‘legitimation of terror groups’ was an ‘intolerable spectacle’ which necessitated the 1979 conference. ¹¹⁴ His father took it a step further, arguing that the UN served as ‘a springboard and clearing house for terrorists’ campaigns’. ¹¹⁵ He underscored the urgency of his case stating that how ‘certain national and international problems’ such as terrorism were treated would ‘vitally affect the future of Israel and the entire democratic world’. ¹¹⁶ In this framing, Israel’s problem with the Palestinian national movement became a problem for all democratic nations.

Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan argue that the Jonathan Institute was an instrument of the Israeli state designed to justify a refusal to negotiate with the Palestinians by depicting them as terrorists. ¹¹⁷ They add that conference organisers sought to bring sympathetic leaders, journalists and experts together to communicate the message that the PLO was a terrorist organisation and that the USSR was its main supporter. The conference was attended by speakers from several nations, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. Overwhelmingly, however, the participants were either from Israel, with a large contingent from the Likud Party including then Prime Minister Menachem Begin, or from the US with prominent conservatives and neoconservatives such as George H. W. Bush, Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, Richard Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Ben Wattenberg, and others in attendance. ¹¹⁸ All these attendees gave presentations initiating the transatlantic production process of a terrorist menace.

In his opening remarks, Benzion Netanyahu stated that the terrorist ‘speaks of “humanitarian” and national causes; he pretends to fight for “freedom” against oppression; he keeps speaking of “legitimate rights”’. But, unlike previous generations of revolutionaries, today’s terrorist has ‘no moral restraints’ and ‘respects no code of law’. Instead, Netanyahu added, he belongs in the same camp as the Nazis because in the ‘genocidal attitude he takes toward the societies he assails, whether it is Ireland, Lebanon, or Israel, he is an offshoot of Nazi philosophy’. ¹¹⁹ He thus expanded on an argument long used against Palestinians in Israel ¹²⁰ by applying it globally. Several speakers who followed Netanyahu argued that terrorists were being appeased on the global stage. Shimon Peres stated that you ‘cannot bring an end to terror around a negotiating table, because the motive of terror is to exact a surrender by terrorizing the other side’. ¹²¹ Thus, the tone set by the first few speakers was that those fighting for self-determination were not involved in a just cause, but were ‘terrorists’ who could not be reasoned with.

The use of the term ‘terrorist’ to describe various leftist groups can be interpreted as a means to delegitimise their struggles. Begin took aim at the ‘New Left’ in Europe, arguing that it represented ‘one of the darkest reactions of human history’ because it was involved in a fight ‘against democracy’ in countries around the world, from Germany, France and Italy to Japan. ¹²² Thus, in contrast to Huntington’s ‘excess of democracy’, Begin framed social movement groups and Left actors as anti-democratic. In addition to non-state actors, speakers in the section on ‘state support for international terrorism’ named Cuba, the Soviet Union, Libya, Iraq, Syria and other ‘Soviet and Arab blocs’ as offering ‘arms, money, training, sanctuary’ to terrorists. ¹²³ Robert Moss, associated with the Institute for the Study of Conflict and CIA funding, argued that the PLO had served as an intermediary between Moscow and Iran’s Khomeini in a plot to overthrow the US-backed Shah. ¹²⁴ Several other American speakers such as Moss’s friend Brian Crozier and George H. W. Bush spoke about the role of the Soviet Union in fostering terrorism. ¹²⁵

A major theme of the conference was that terrorism was an attack on the West, democracy, and civilisation. The titles of four of the seven sessions include the words ‘democratic’ or ‘free men’. While the liberal Trilateral Commission had raised the alarm but not denounced social justice movements, conservatives took it a step further. ¹²⁶ Senator Jackson declared that the ‘stated goal’ of terrorists is to ‘destroy the very fabric of democracy’. ¹²⁷ Democracy was reclaimed by conservatives as a way to defang progressive groups. The British historian Paul Johnson advanced the notion that ‘terrorism is a war against civilization’. He argued that the ‘forces of savagery’ were pushing against the gates of ‘civilization’ just as they had in ancient Rome. ¹²⁸ For Johnson, the freedoms that exist in ‘liberal civilizations’ were the very conditions for the rise of terrorism. ¹²⁹ One could read the focus on democracy, and the reclaiming of the term, as a means to rebrand colonialism.

Several speakers set out to debunk the notion that one person’s freedom fighter was another person’s terrorist. ¹³⁰ This way of characterising the use of armed struggle in the pursuit of self-determination was anathema for those who sought to revive colonialism. In this sense, the arguments advanced at the conference stood in direct contrast to the resolutions passed in the UN General Assembly affirming self-determination and condemning colonialism and racism. In response to this, speakers in the closing session stressed the ‘need to create an anti-terror alliance among the democratic nations’. ¹³¹ This alliance can be understood as particularly relevant for Israel which had been labelled ‘racist’ and ‘colonialist’ at UN meetings. Global support for the Palestinian cause presented a threat to Israel’s very future, as Benzion argued. For the US, the alliance was a means to squash the Left domestically and internationally in the name of counter-terrorism and revive US hegemony on the global stage.

In the section on the media, speakers noted that the news tended to ‘romanticize the terrorist’. By referring to terrorists as ‘urban guerillas’ or ‘freedom fighters’, the media created confusion. The proposed plan was for governments to provide publicly owned media with a ‘code for the treatment of terrorists and specific terrorist acts’. ¹³² Stampnitzky’s study of archived Jonathan Institute’s bulletins suggests that conference organisers were pleased with international media coverage of the conference. The October bulletin stated that the conference ‘had a decisive impact on the Western perception of international terrorism and the central role of the PLO in it’. ¹³³ However, this has been difficult to verify. A search of Proquest historical newspapers that contains key papers in the US netted only two articles specifically about the conference. ¹³⁴ Both were sympathetic. A long article by a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff presented the conference themes positively. ¹³⁵ The Washington Post ran an op-ed by conference attendee George Will, ¹³⁶ later reprinted in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I expanded the date range in the New York Times database and found an op-ed by conference attendee Robert Moss, albeit a year after the conference. It is therefore hard to say the extent to which the 1979 conference shifted media coverage in the US without a more systematic analysis, searching, for instance, for op-eds by conference attendees or the role they played as terrorism experts.

However, the conference was immediately successful in influencing politics. Many conservatives and neoconservatives, including attendees of the conference, occupied top positions in the Reagan administration. The day the hostages were released in Iran, Reagan used his inaugural speech to repudiate Carter’s foreign policy and replace it with a militarist stance centred on terrorism. Top officials in the Reagan administration, such as George Shultz and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both speakers at the second conference in 1984, ensured that counter-terrorism assumed a central focus.

Held in Washington DC, this second conference signaled the resonance of the arguments of 1979 in Reagan’s America. The rightward shift in American politics provided fertile ground for the deepening of terrorism thinking. The 1984 conference echoed several themes from 1979. Additionally, the new concept of ‘Islamic terrorism’ entered the picture. During his opening remarks, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was appointed ambassador to the UN that year, stated that ‘modern terrorism has its roots in two movements that have assumed international prominence in the second half of the twentieth century – communist totalitarianism and Islamic (and Arab) radicalism’. ¹³⁷ By this point, Iran had emerged as a key threat to Israel. The 1979 Iranian revolution had deposed the US-backed Shah and exemplified resistance to US imperialism. Political Islam was on the rise, and secular nationalist forces were in retreat. The rise of Hamas in Palestine in the 1980s and its attempts to wrest hegemony from the PLO, as well as the birth of Hezbollah, with Iranian support, in Lebanon, created new challenges for Israel. Thus, Netanyahu retained but bracketed Arab radicalism and elevated Islamism. But rather than omitting the PLO, he presented it as a ‘terrorist mini-state in Lebanon’ and ‘a training center and launching group for what had become a kind of terrorist international’. ¹³⁸ Such a re-articulation was possibly also designed to restore Israel’s damaged image among US liberals after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. ¹³⁹ More significantly, as a result of historically contingent developments, the terrorist was expanded from the Arab secular nationalist to those inspired by ‘Islamic radicalism’.

The 1984 conference added a session on ‘Terrorism and the Islamic World’, which included the Orientalists Bernard Lewis, Elie Kedourie, and Panyotidis Vatikiotis. These three developed the civilisation theme from the 1979 conference and consolidated the language on ‘Islamic terrorism’. Lewis justified the use of the term ‘Islamic terrorism’ on the grounds that ‘Islam is a political religion’ and that Muhammad, in contrast to other religious leaders, had ‘founded a state and governed it’. ¹⁴⁰ He added that since Islam structures the lives of Muslims and is the ‘only really effective system of ideas, symbols, and slogans for the mobilization of Muslim masses’, it follows that ‘when the Islamic world confronts the problem of terrorism, that problem, too, assumes a religious, indeed in a sense an Islamic, aspect’. ¹⁴¹ Elie Kedourie argued that there is ‘a prevalent − and justifiable − impression that an appreciable part of terrorist activities today originate, and frequently take place, in the world of Islam, and particularly in its Arab portion’. ¹⁴² Cherry-picking historical examples, starting with the assassination of Ali and going on to the Assassins of the tenth century, and up to Khomeini’s Iran, which he claimed ‘exemplifies the idea of a “terrorist state”’, ¹⁴³ Kedourie knitted together a narrative of a trans-historical ‘Islamic terrorism’. Thus, Arab and Iranian Muslims became part of the evolving discourse of terrorcraft.

Unlike the 1979 conference, this conference did receive significant media coverage, as various scholars have noted. ¹⁴⁴ Indeed, a search for terrorism news with the name Benjamin Netanyahu returns over 110 news articles from 1984 to 1990 in the Proquest database. Netanyahu had positioned himself as a ‘terrorism expert’ and did much to shape the dialogue, including through the publication of a volume based on the conference proceedings that was widely circulated. However, in my analysis of New York Times headline articles from 1980 to 1991 there was not a preponderance of Arabs, Iranians and Muslims; instead, a range of actors from Europe, Latin America and Asia were seen as part of the terrorist menace. It would take until the 1990s for Muslims to become the predominant face of terrorism in newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. ¹⁴⁵

Television, however, gave more attention to the Arab and Muslim terrorist threat in the 1980s, just as it did in the 1970s. Even though there were four times as many anti-US terrorist acts in Latin America as in the Middle East, Muslims and Arabs were becoming the face of terrorism. ¹⁴⁶ To be sure, Latin America was also part of the story of terrorism. The Reagan and Bush administrations spent billions of dollars to discover evidence of a ‘narco-terrorist’ threat. They deployed the term in 1984 to refer to guerilla activity in Colombia and, for the next few years, Reagan argued that terrorism and drug-trafficking were ‘twin menaces’ and ‘twin killers’. ¹⁴⁷ Reagan tied the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to Gaddafi in Libya, as well as to Arafat and Khomeini in a schema that considered all of them as part of an international menace. ¹⁴⁸

As the 1980s progressed, the ideology of terrorcraft was further entrenched through the ritualistic production and consumption of spectacular events. After the Iran hostage crisis, the second most covered television news story was the bombing of the US marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Bethami Dobkin’s analysis of ABC news shows that the word ‘terrorist’ was used sparingly in the first few days after the bombing. It soon gave way to a framework that focused on ‘cultures that breed terrorism’. ¹⁴⁹ While Reagan’s constant speeches about civilisation and barbarism, influenced perhaps by the Jonathan Institute conferences, likely played a role in this construction, the use of ‘culture’ to explain the behaviour of racialised others was predominant. ¹⁵⁰ Reagan routinely referred to terrorism as ‘barbarism’, as an ‘enemy of civilization’ ¹⁵¹ and as a ‘scourge of civilization’. ¹⁵² Shultz, as Secretary of State, stated that terrorism was a ‘return to barbarism in the modern age’. ¹⁵³ The focus of hundreds of presidential speeches, ‘terrorism’ emerged as an ideograph, i.e. a dominant and normative means of interpreting reality. ¹⁵⁴ By the 1990s, Arabs were being initially blamed for attacks such as the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and the 1996 Olympic Games bombing in Atlanta, even though they were not involved. ¹⁵⁵

Conclusion

This article has argued that terrorist racial formation, or ‘terrorcraft’, is a process. It has a definite starting point in the US, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the emergence of the Arab American Left viewed by the security state as a risk. Begun in the late 1960s, it was systematised after the Munich killings when Arab Americans via Operation Boulder were refashioned as terrorists through racial profiling. The development of the ideology of terrorcraft followed slowly. In news media coverage of terrorism, disproportionate attention was given to Arabs in network television news, as well as in the New York Times during the years 1972–1974. However, Arabs were by no means the only terrorist actors and terrorcraft as an ideology was only in nascent form. The 1979 Iranian revolution brought the ‘Islamic terrorist’ into the mix and created a framework that future attacks on US targets would entrench through repeated and ritualistic media coverage, particularly on television. The two Jonathan Institute conferences played an important role in shaping terrorcraft, and the conferences would advance the agenda of counter-terrorism. Various speakers set out in 1979 to debunk the UN General Assembly’s resolutions that upheld self-determination and denounced colonialism and racism. The effect of both conferences was to rehabilitate empire and colonialism. The rise of the Right in the US and the decline of the Left served to consolidate this shift and give form to terrorcraft.

None of this was inevitable. Terrorcraft, as I have argued, is a historically contingent project. What this means is that it is both subject to evolution and to dismantling. Since 9/11, measures designed to target the racialised terrorist have been broadened to include threats from the ‘eco-terrorist’ and Occupy Wall Street activists to black activists. In this sense, terrorcraft is malleable and can even be deracialised in service to empire and counter-insurgency. Ideologically, however, as of this writing, brown men continued to be the dominant face of terrorism even while, after the rash of racist violence in 2019, there were calls to label white nationalism as terrorism. ¹⁵⁶ Furthermore, precisely because it is a process, and a historically contingent project, terrorcraft can also be challenged. As Fields and Fields put it, ‘[r]ace is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons.’ ¹⁵⁷ It is this possibility of change that animates this article, which is written to make a small contribution to anti-imperialist/anti-racist movements in the hope that they might unsettle global politics and put an end to anti-Muslim racism and empire.