What’s Terrorism–And What Isn’t

Belatedly, the world recognizes the peculiar evil of terrorism—the murder of innocent people, the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the sense of personal vulnerability, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public places, the coerciveness of precaution. All this seems obvious now, but as soon as it is obvious, something strange happens. Terrorism, recognized as an evil, becomes the only evil; everything anyone opposes must be called terrorism; antiterrorism is terrorism too. Colonel Qaddafi and his European apologists follow a familiar pattern when they call the American raid “state terrorism.”

Consider the pattern. If slavery is the paradigmatic wrong, then capitalism must be “wage slavery,” though that misnames the phenomenon, as any slave would know. What looks like mere exaggeration, a piece of linguistic exploitation, produces genuine misunderstanding. Now it is so much more difficult to get at what is really wrong with the wa...