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Glenn Greenwald on How to Be a Terror "Expert": Ignore Facts, Blame Muslims, Trumpet U.S. Propaganda
Steve Emerson's gaffe on Fox News raises questions about the entire field of so-called "terrorism experts."
By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now! January 13, 2015
グリーンウォルド：どうやってテロ専門家になるか？－－－事実を無視して、イスラム教徒のせいにして、アメリのプロパガンダを吹聴すればよい、と。
なるほどねえ、これも面白いな。
番組のきっかけは、テロ”専門家”が、イギリスでは、イスラム教徒しか入れない地域がある、ようなことを言って、キャメロン首相にバカ扱いされた輩がいたわけですね。
テレビにでる”専門家”は特に資格はいらないので、事実は無視して、アメリカの宣伝をラッパのようにがなりたてているだけだ。
GLENN GREENWALD: The concept of terrorism is a very widely debated concept all over the world, and there are incredibly divergent opinions, even about what terrorism is, about who it is who’s perpetrating it, about how it is that you define it and understand it, and whether or not there’s even a meaningful definition of the term at all. And yet you have all of these so-called terrorism experts employed by leading American television networks—all of them, really—and on whom most establishment newspapers rely, who are called terrorism experts and yet who are incredibly homogenous in their views, because they spout the very homogenized American conception of all of those questions.
It’s an incredibly propagandized term. It’s an incredibly propagandistic set of theories that they have. And that’s really what these media outlets are doing, is they’re masquerading pro-U.S. propaganda, pro-U.S. government propaganda, as expertise, when it’s really anything but. These are incredibly ideological people. They’re very loyal to the view of the U.S. government about very controversial questions.
Part of it is just the role that think tanks play in Washington, which is to lend this kind of intellectual artifice to whatever the government’s policy is or whatever the government wants. And so you have a lot of them who work at think tanks, like Brookings Institute, which employs Will McCants, who misled American media outlets into believing for a full day and then telling the world that the Anders Breivik attack in Norway was actually the work of a jihadist group.
テレビや新聞に出てくるテロ”専門家”はいろいろいても、似たりよったりの意見であるのは、要するに、似たより寄ったりのアメリカ政府の宣伝を繰り返しているだけだからだ、と。
日本について記事で、似たような主題、似たような切り口で、似たような見解が繰り返されるのが、事実や多様性を無視した固定観念によるものが多いせいであるのと似ていますね。
There’s not even agreement about what the word "terrorism" means, which is why the old cliché that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist is, though clichéd, is so resoundingly true. You can have debates about what terrorism is, about who perpetrates it, and yet all of these so-called experts simply assume the answers to those questions, because if they were, for example, to say that the U.S. government is a state sponsor of terrorism by virtue of its support for death squads in El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua or any of the other groups across the United States—across the world that the United States continues to support that engages in violence against civilians for political ends, you would immediately have them eliminated. No major network like CNN or MSNBC or NBC would ever call somebody like that a terrorism expert, even though that’s a very plausible claim to make. It’s an extremely ideological and politicized view that gets called expertise
There is some amazingly great scholarly research by Rémi Brulin, who was at the Sorbonne and then NYU, where he traces, essentially, the history of this term in political discourse. And what he has described, in a very scholarly way, is that the term "terrorism" really entered and became prevalent in the discourse of international affairs in the late '60s and the early ’70s, when the Israelis sought to use the term to universalize their disputes with their neighbors, so they could say, "We're not fighting the Palestinians and we’re not bombing Lebanon over just some land disputes. We’re fighting this concept that is of great—a grave menace to the world, called 'terrorism.' And it’s not only our fight, it’s your fight in the United States, and it’s your fight in Europe, and it’s your fight around the world."
The term is incredibly malleable, because it’s typically just meant as a term that says any violence we don’t like is something we’re going to call terrorism. And at this point it really just means violence engaged in by Muslims against the West. That’s really the definition of the term "terrorism," the functional definition. It has no fixed definition.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, I remember at the beginning, at the Oklahoma City bombing attack, when two names of Arab men were floated. It turned out they were New York taxi drivers who had gone to Oklahoma City to renew their licenses. But those names were put out by the media, and then there was the question: Was this a terrorist attack? When it turned out it was Timothy McVeigh—Timothy McVeigh, who worked with other people, had all the—you know, all the definition of a terrorist attack—then it wasn’t. "Oh, no, it was Timothy McVeigh, and he did this, a white Christian man." No longer did we refer to it as a terrorist attack.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, that happens all the time. First of all, it was Steve Emerson, the very same Steve Emerson who just said that Birmingham was an all-Muslim city that no non-Muslims can enter, who was working at the time—either at the time for CNN or just afterwards, who went on, on the air, and was the most influential comment shaping what you just described. And he said the attempt here was to kill as many people as possible, which is a Middle East attribute, and therefore we should assume or highly speculate that this is likely an attack perpetrated by someone from the Middle East, someone who is Muslim. That’s how that narrative actually started. Steve Emerson’s career didn’t suffer at all from that.
But, you know, if you watch how these attacks are discussed, every time there’s an attack where the assailant or the perpetrator is unknown, the media will say it’s unknown whether or not terrorism is involved. And what they really mean by that is: It’s unknown whether or not the perpetrator is Muslim. And as soon as they discover that the perpetrator is a Christian or is American, a white American, they’ll say, "We now have confirmation that this is not a terrorist attack." It’s something else—someone who’s mentally unstable, some extremist, something like that. It really is a term that functionally now means nothing other than Muslims who engage in violence against the West.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I remember there was an individual named Joseph Stack who flew an airplane into a government building in Texas, into the side of the IRS, actually. And for the first several hours of the reporting, it was said that the suspicion is that this is a terrorist attack, because it was on a government facility. And then when it was discovered that he was actually a right-wing, anti-tax, anti-government American, they said, actually, this isn’t a terrorist attack, this is just kind of this crazy person who did this for political ends.
GLENN GREENWALD:And I think this is one of the most pernicious aspects of these so-called terrorism experts and terrorism expertise, which is, if you are an American citizen or if you’re a French citizen or if you’re a British citizen, you have a greater chance of being killed by slipping in the bathtub tonight and hitting your head on the ceramic tile, or being struck by lightning—literally—than you do dying in a terrorist attack. And yet these terrorism experts have it in their interest to constantly hype and exaggerate the threat and fearmonger over it, because that’s how they become relevant. They become relevant in terms of their work. They become relevant in terms of their government contracts and in terms of the money that they make. And it really has infected large parts of Western thinking to view terrorism as a much, much greater threat than just rationally and statistically it really is. And I think that’s—a big part of that is at the feet of these so-called terrorism experts.
Terrorism
From Wikipedia,
Terrorism is commonly defined as to refer to only those violent acts that are intended to create fear (terror); are perpetrated for a religious, political, or ideological goal; and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (e.g., neutral military personnel or civilians). Another common definition is political, ideological or religious violence by non-state actors..... In the international community, terrorism has no legally binding, criminal law definition.[3][4]
The word "terrorism" is politically loaded and emotionally charged,[5] and this greatly compounds the difficulty of providing a precise definition.
テロとは、恐怖を生むような暴力行為であって、宗教的、政治的、思想的目的をもって実行され、しかも、一般人を標的にするか、あるいは、一般人に対する安全の配慮を欠くものを、と一般には言われれるが、国際社会でも、法律的にも厳格な定義があるわけではない、と。
非常に政治的な意味合いを持った言葉であって、大量殺人や政府機関やの破壊活動があったとして、犯人がイスラム教徒だとテロ、そうでないとわかると、ただの事件 というのが実際の用語法である、と。
南米でアメリカが政治的目的をもって、死の部隊を雇って一般人を標的にして、恐怖を与えているからといって、テロ国家といわれるわけではないし、そんなことを言ったら、”専門家”廃業になってしまう、と。
アメリカ人や、イギリス人やフランス人が、テロで死ぬ確率は、風呂場ですっころんで死んでしまう確率より低いにも関わらず、”専門家”たちは、テロの恐怖をがなりたて、不安を煽って、アメリカ政府の宣伝をするのである、と。
もともと、イスラエルが、テロ、テロと言い出したのは、単なる領土争いじゃないんだ、世界中がテロリストと戦わなくちゃいけないんだ、というように、アメリカを、そして世界を巻き込むために使われ始めた枠組みなのである、と。
・・・・われわれもフォックスニュースやＮＹＴの宣伝工作に踊らされないように注意しないといけない。
アメリカの主流のメディアというのは本当、固定観念的で、あるいは、政府の口 のようになっているのですが、少数派ながらも、こうした、自己批判的で、冷静なメディアがあるところもアメリカの強みになっている、ところにも注目。
