When we call a man a terrorist, we bestow a certain status on him. He ceases to be a common criminal, a violent narcissist, a drop-out. He becomes, instead, a man with a cause.

Bellicose young men, in all ages and nations, look for ideologies that justify their aggression. Sometimes, they latch on to an organisation that already exists – the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the IRA, al-Qaeda. Sometimes, as with Anders Behring Breivik or Seung-Hui Cho, they develop their own Weltanschauung – often in language so conceited and hackneyed that, in other
circumstances, it would be laughable.

 

Absolutely right. In the 1980s several  IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland, serving sentences for crimes of murder or aiding and abetting murder, went on hunger strike because they wanted to be granted the status of being called political prisoners. Maggie Thatcher faced them down – she knew that giving  them that status would immediately transform  them into enemy combatants, warriors to be treated with respect outside the battlefield because they were fighting for what they believed was a just cause. So she instructed that they were to be treated as criminals, men and women who  murdered, tortured, kidnapped and robbed law abiding citizens.

Equally do not inflate these murderers egos by describing their victims as being “executed” – that portrays the murder  as a killing sanctioned by higher law and acts as a useful psychological justification tool for those with murder on their mind.

Calling a “terrorist” a criminal  buttresses his own self belief that his gruesome deeds have some sort of moral dimension that takes him far above the child killers, wife beaters and gang enforcers who inhabit the other cells. Calling him a criminal would demean his actions .

The killers of Drummer Rigby in Woolwich were murderers not religious/political activists. The more often we spell that out the less likely shall we hear those weasel words

“Of course I cannot condone these killings BUT……..”