Terrorism
The following pages of commentary on aspects of terrorism support Chapter 4 of your primary text, “Introduction to Homeland Security."
Terrorism, like many other controversial social phenomena, lacks a universally accepted definition. Since September 11, 2001, the term has been overused to describe a multitude of criminal acts and it has become a monolithic term commensurate with Islamic Extremism and Fundamentalism.
This is a most unfortunate point of view because such a limited perspective narrows the intellectual focus of the American homeland security apparatus thereby potentially creating a future vulnerability to non-Islamic related acts of terrorism. For example, in the not too distant past Northern Ireland was beset with untold acts of violence and terror as a result of religious and nationalistic differences between Christians. In our own country we have seen endless acts of terror committed against the black community, for example by the KKK, as they have struggled for over 200 years to reach a level of equality and freedom readily bestowed upon white Americans from our country’s birth. Basque separatists have been fighting for self-government and their own homeland separate from Spain since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The Red Brigade in Italy seeks to bring about a Communist revolution in Italy, which its members believe will then spread to the rest of Europe. These are just a few of the thousands of examples of what is considered non-state sponsored terrorism and as appalling as their atrocities have been they pale in comparison to the “terrorism and genocide in the name of the state.
Throughout history, from the time of ancient Egyptians, who always took the time to kill every member of a defeated army, to the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Sudan, this has been true. State-sponsored terrorism in the twentieth century alone resulted in untold millions of deaths. Human rights movements, such as Amnesty International and others have begun to shine bright light on the depredations committed by nations against their own people. Power and religious fanaticism have driven the kinds of terrorism that resulted in Hitler’s Holocaust and the conflicts between the Irish Catholics and Protestants, the Jews and Arabs, Shia and Sunni Muslims, and dozens of other conflicts around the globe (Simonsen and Spindlove, 2007, p.71).”