An act or activity that involves breaking the law. The word—which comes from the Latin crimin, meaning accusation, reproach, or judgment—is also used to mean any morally undesirable or reprehensible act. Such language of reproach can oc-cur wherever someone’s definition of wrongdoing gives way to blaming and stig-matizing others or their actions. For example, white supremacists condemn racial intermarriage as being criminal; to President Theodore Roosevelt, Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent who failed to bring forth children to forestall the extinction of the white race were criminals (Delbanco 1995, 168). Agendas and movements also can be delegitimized by calling them “criminal.” In defending his railroad empire against the threat of workers’ strikes, for example, nineteenth-century rail-road magnate Thomas Scott charged that strikers were under the sway of vicious
“criminals.”
Although terrorists are often identified as criminals, the two should be distin-guished (Hoffman 1998, 41–43); while both may use violence to achieve their goals, their objectives are different. The criminal’s motivation is selfish, often material Crazy
45 gain, and he or she does not expect to create effects beyond the immediate reward
of the illegal act. No political, moral, or religious message is being conveyed; pub-lic opinion is not being molded. By contrast, the terrorist is out to reform the “sys-tem.” He is not “driven by the wish to line his own pocket or satisfy some personal need or grievance. At least in his own mind, the terrorist is fundamentally an al-truist:he believes that he is serving a ‘good’ cause” (Hoffman 1998, 43). He is also likely part of a political organization that claims to act on some larger group’s (e.g., race, class, or ethnic group) behalf and may be capable of mass mobilization to-ward war. Criminals do not conduct mass campaigns for some ideal.
Terrorists, of course, may also be criminals, often in more than one sense or in more than one of their activities, though that status does depend on the legal or political system in which the attack is made (many observers outside South Africa, for example, would not have classified the attacks of the African National Con-gress against the apartheid government as “criminal”). Terrorist acts typically in-clude such crimes as murder, arson, and kidnapping, these and other attacks on civilians being crimes under U.S. law. Some terrorists may even exploit their es-poused cause to commit murder or attain material reward for its own sake. In ad-dition, many terrorist groups rely on criminal activities to move around (e.g., forged documents) and eliminate enemies (contract killers), and especially to fund their cause. For example, the Anti-Defamation League (Action Update, March 2001, 3) claims that Nazi Low Riders, a primarily California-based organization responsible for a number of fierce racist attacks, is driven largely by profit from extortion, armed robbery, and drug trafficking. Laqueur (1999, 15) notes the resemblance between the nineteenth-century theory of revolution-through-terror, espoused by Mikhail Bakunin—who advocated joining robbers and brigands with terrorists as a formi-dable combined force—and today’s alliance between terrorists and crime syndicates.
In addition, many acts of terrorism, like common crime, have been committed by individuals or small groups on territory that is part of an established government, not by military forces operating in a war zone or on contested territory (Rubenstein 1987, 22–23). Thus, language assimilates acts of terrorism to domestic crime cat-egories: the terrorist soldier’s shooting becomes “murder,” the capture of prisoners,
“kidnapping,” and expropriation is “robbery.” Finally, both crime and terrorism have their innocent victims, although there are also typically such victims in other vio-lent activities (and terrorists, in particular, may not define the civilians of a coun-try whose interests they attack as “innocent”).
The criminal label adds force to the images of moral deterioration and pathol-ogy evoked in the wake of terrorist mayhem (see also MADMAN;MISFIT;TERRORISM
AS DISEASE). The label also challenges consideration of the terrorist as soldier (Carr 2002, 7) by presenting instead images of thugs, villains, and gangsters. Thus, for instance, “The murderous thugs of the IRA (and the similar loyalist gangsters) don’t care about what the people of Ireland want—they have their deluded dreams, and let’s face it, extortion rackets and drug-dealing” (letter, Frontline on-line, October 5, 2001). According to Carr (2002, 8–9), however, the problem with identifying terrorists as criminals is that it limits a government largely to the use of reactive
Crime
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and defensive measures. Until September 11, 2001, antiterrorist efforts were lim-ited largely to detective and intelligence work, failing to treat terrorists as trained, organized, paramilitary units that wage war against nations and societies. Of course, before September 11, terrorists were considered small fringe groups of suicide bomb-ers and hijackbomb-ers—more an annoyance than a military menace.
Chomsky (2001, 23–26) takes a different perspective, emphasizing the need, as in criminal procedures, for finding evidence, apprehending the criminals, and deal-ing with the reasons for their use of terror. These are the steps typically taken when, for example, IRA bombs have gone off in London; no one calls for the bombing of West Belfast. Working with at least a minimal commitment to international law, says Chomsky, will help to reduce the chances of further terrorist attacks. But those who dismiss Chomsky’s criminal view of terrorism point out that it does not take seriously settings in which police methods cannot be expected to work, as in Afghanistan where al-Qaeda terrorists hid after September 11. “Which was the court where these guys could be summoned?” asked Todd Gitlin. “Were subpoe-nas to be dropped at the mouths of the caves of Tora Bora?” (Shatz 2002, 6).
Criminaltravels a two-way route. Terrorists attacking U.S. interests have accused the United Sates of “hideous crimes.” In an interview with Peter Arnett of CNN, Osama bin Laden said, “We declared jihad against the U.S. government, because the U.S. government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical” (flinet.com/jihad, 2002). See also
ASSASSINATION;BANDIT;BRIGADE;GUERRILLA;MASTERMIND;SOLDIER;TERRORISM.
Crusade
From the Latin crux, “cross,” one of the military expeditions undertaken by Chris-tian Europeans that took place between 1095 and 1270 aiming to recover the Holy Land and the Christian shrine of the Holy Selpulchre from Muslim control; any vigorous movement to achieve a cause or end an abuse. The medieval usage (Arab chroniclers spoke not of crusades, but of “the Frankish invasions”) resounds still today in the context of Middle Eastern conflict and terrorism.
The historical Christian Crusades began in response to reports reaching the Latin Christian states of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem being accosted and of the Byz-antine Empire facing a defeat in Anatolia. The ByzByz-antine emperor called upon Pope Urban II for help; in 1095, the pope, hoping not only to retake the Holy Land but also to Catholicize the Byzantine Church, launched the First Crusade against the Muslim world. Promised not just salvation but land, wealth, and fame, members of a crusading force assembled at Constantinople for the First Crusade against the
“infidel.” In 1099, Christian crusaders attacked Jerusalem—a holy city where for hundreds of years Christianity, Islam, and Judaism had generally managed to co-exist—massacring its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The Kurdish general Saladin, as he is known in the West, recaptured the city in 1187. Christian invaders remained in the Middle East for another century, but their local significance dwindled; they came to be seen as an unimportant episode in the long Islamic history of the area (Armstrong 2000b, 179).
Crusade
47 Armstrong (2000b, 179–80) discusses the distorted, stereotypical image of Islam
that took shape in the West during the Crusades. Many elements of this stereo-type remain today, not only in popular thought but sometimes in Washington policy circles: Islam is the enemy of civilization, an inherently violent faith established by the sword, with a fanatical intolerance. Intolerance, according to Armstrong,
“has become one of the received ideas of the West” about Islam (180).
When Muslims appear to live up to this stereotype—as when militant Islamists turn to violence allegedly to resist the cultural and social disruptions brought by modernization, considered inimical to faith—it is quickly revived in the media.
Thus, when al-Qaeda, Muslims who see themselves as fighting against Western imperialism and its influences, attacked innocent Americans on U.S. soil in Sep-tember 2001, the whole image of Islam, already in question, was quickly assembled in its traditional stereotypical form. Arising in the West was the perception of the need for a new crusade against the “backward” religion.
Indeed, President Bush quickly proclaimed a “crusade” to “rid the world of the evildoers” (see also EVIL). However, just as quickly, the president was advised to apologize for the reference to crusade, fearing that it would convey (or reinforce) the image of the U.S. government as arrogant and thereby lose the support of al-lies in Muslim countries (particularly, it would seem, those in oil-rich countries).
He was also advised that bin Laden had set a trap to make the conflict one be-tween Christianity and the Muslim world. But even with the urging of caution against stereotyping, the accusation of “evil,” though specifically directed at radi-cal fundamentalist violence, hung over Islam generally, much as it had during the medieval Crusades. Pope Urban II had spoken of exacting vengeance against a
“malevolent race . . . accursed, estranged from God.” With the crusader language, Christendom’s cause was made to seem just: its evil enemies were targeted for de-struction (Lapham 2002, 7). (One view of President Bush’s word choice argued that he had drawn the term less from the medieval Crusades than from American re-formers who crusaded against local political corruption, though the Muslim con-text would render that interpretation unlikely.)
Even before September 11, there was Desert Storm, the 1991 U.S. military cam-paign to drive Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The operation code name
“Desert Storm” has been described as acquiring the general sense of any “glorious prospective crusade in which the United States can and should expect to vanquish various foes . . . in countries run by geopolitical infidels of the moment” (Solomon 1992).
While possessing themselves a vigorous true-believer ideology often more ex-treme than anything comparable in the West, militant Islamists currently view the West as today’s “crusaders.” In the twentieth century, with the rise of a threaten-ing Western presence in the Islamic world, Muslim historians looked back on the medieval Crusades with nostalgia, “longing for a leader who would be able to con-tain the neo-Crusade of Western imperialism” (Armstrong 2000b, 95). On Sep-tember 23, 2001, terrorist leader Osama bin Laden announced that he hoped Muslim casualties in Pakistan would be “among the first martyrs in Islam’s battle
Crusade
in this era against the new Christian-Jewish crusade led by the big crusader Bush under the flag of the Cross” (www.adl.org/terrorism, April 2002). Bin Laden’s um-brella terrorist organization, formed in 1998, was named the Islamic World Front for the Struggle against the Jews and the Crusaders.
In modern Arabic literature, it is largely the Jew who appears as the crusader (see also JEW). The Jews are seen as people of mostly European background who have invaded and occupied the Palestinian homeland. “Just as a handful of cru-saders controlled the Arab masses with their network of daunting fortresses and tight urban communities, so today, say Arab intellectuals, Israel controls the Arab majority with its American-backed military might and its fortified, barbed-wire-encircled hilltop settlements” (Reston 2001, xviii).
In the United States, following September 11, there was some sensitivity to the use of the term crusade and the arrogance and threat it projected to the Islamic world. At least one school, Wheaton College, dropped the use of “Crusader” as a team mascot, although the mascot remained in place in many schools across the country. The Ku Klux Klan, committed zealously to a cause of white Christian su-premacy, also retained it as theirs. See also CIVILIZATION,CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS;
FANATIC;FUNDAMENTALIST;INFIDEL;JIHAD;MARTYR;MEDIEVAL; MUSLIM; OPERATION IN
-FINITE JUSTICE;WARRIOR,HOLY WARRIOR. Crusade
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