The “New Nature” of Terrorism
The topic of terrorism has been on everyone’s minds for some time now, especially since the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. This event caused a great deal of trauma to the United States, officially launching us into the War on Terror and proving that the United States was susceptible to attacks on its own soil. For one of the first times in history, planes were used to launch an international terrorist attack, but a previous terrorist attack that used planes effectively brought international terrorism into the spotlight.
The first of attack of this kind took place in 1972, when members of the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September kidnapped and murdered members of the Israeli Olympic team. The members were taken from the Olympic Village in Munich to waiting helicopters. They were then flown to an air base west of the Olympic Village, where the West German police were waiting. Once the aircraft the terrorists required arrived, they inspected it and discovered they were being tricked. A gunfight between the terrorists and the police ensued, killing several police and many of the attackers. The Israeli hostages were all bound together inside the plane, and for the time being they survived. However, one of the surviving terrorists threw a bomb inside the helicopter, killing all but one hostage, and another terrorist shot a gun throughout the inside of the helicopter, killing the last hostage. (cite)
Many scholars claim that this attack was the beginning of “modern terrorism”. It was the first attack to receive widespread television coverage both during and after the attack, and it was the first time that aircraft was used to conduct an attack. I, however, tend to believe that terrorism is cyclical, and that the term “modern terrorism” really means that old practices are reemerging. Suicide bombing is nothing knew, and large, impactful attacks are also not new. Additionally, it is entirely possible that terrorism is “modernized”, but this could have begun at several different points: it could have begun with the 1972 Munich Olympic attacks because of the highly public nature of the event, it could have begun with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 because, at least to Americans, it was a direct attack on the government, or it could have begun with another event.
One way in which terrorism is definitely modernized is through recruitment. Due the prevalence of social media, terrorists are able to recruit over long distances and they have greater access to susceptible individuals. Using social media as a recruitment tool is rather ingenious because it allows leaders to target disenchanted individuals and use them as pawns in their plans. Additionally, if Middle Eastern terrorists target westerners, it allows them a certain degree of anonymity as westerners would draw less attention when walking in a place crowded with other westerners (a suicide bomber walking into a crowded place).
How to stop terrorism is one of the biggest issues the world is facing. Because there are so many threats and so many ways of carrying out these threats, it is almost impossible to know what to do. I think the first step would be to stop viewing terrorists as irrational individuals. These people have a goal or a cause for which they are fighting, whether it is religious, political, or something else. Because they are fighting for something, they are inherently rational beings: they believe in something and they are willing to fight, or die, for it.
A second step would be to adopt a universal definition of terrorism so that every single nation is on the same page as far as what is terrorism versus war. For example, and I do not claim to have the answer to this, do North Korea’s threats to the United States count as acts of terrorism or acts of aggression that precede a war? This is a tough question because the definition of terrorism is so vague that it can count as both terrorism and aggression. Or do aggressive acts count as terrorism? Surely sometimes they do, but where is the line drawn? This is where the universal definition would be helpful, because if we can define terrorism and put a face to the name, we can begin to take actions to counteract it.
Although terrorism is a problem the world throughout, it has served the purpose of uniting most people against a common enemy. The shared trauma of people and nations that have been attacked by terrorists serves the purpose of bringing everyone closer together and unifying them against terror. Although there is no solution to terrorism, and its cyclical nature may prove impossible to defeat, there is a rather strong force fighting against terrorism. Although it is hard to believe that anything good can come from a terrorist attack, terrorism has brought many people and nations together in an effort to combat it.