What is Terror?

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The question of what terrorism actually is, and if the term has any really value, was something I planned to discuss in my Terror War article series, but mostly cut, as I described in my foreword to that series:

I also needed to tackle the complex problem of terminology, this conflict is tangled in very loaded terms and names, of course “terrorism” itself is a very obvious example, terrorism is defined as the use of violence to intimidate and achieve political goals, but this is such a broad term you could use it to describe the actions of most governments and of many “freedom fighter” groups around the world.

Really “terrorism” is a term that’s essentially based on vibes, for violent political groups we do like they’re freedom fighters, for the ones we don’t like they’re terrorists, there’s no consistent definition at all, I considered discussing this point in the script but ultimately left it out in the end except for a few scattered references to the point that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.

That question was planned to be tackled as part of the first episode’s intro section, a part I did write but later cut from the intro, I wanted to bring back what I wrote there in this article but sadly if you make too many edits to an article Google Docs will start to merge the version history of earlier versions to save space (a feature they don’t ask your permission for and don’t let you turn off), so my original writing on that topic is just lost to time.

The series itself was all about terrorist organisations, focusing on branches of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Daesh (aka ISIS) and the stories of how they came about and spread, but I rarely actually called them “terrorists”, with many uses of terrorism/terrorist being quotes or lines that otherwise recognised the subjectivity of the term.

To explore some more examples, if terrorism is the use of serious violence (especially against civilians) for political ends (especially to intimidate), isn’t every government practicing terrorism?

Let’s say you don’t pay your taxes, maybe its based on morals or maybe you’d rather just have more money in your pocket, very quickly that’s going to lead to violence. At first there’ll be letters, maybe phone calls, encouraging you to pay before it has to go further, then a court summons, if you don’t go to that voluntarily the police will come to your door, at first they’ll probably ask you to open it, but if you don’t they’ll kick the door in, they’ll ask you not to struggle and just go with them, but if you don’t they’ll beat you and drag you out. That’s violence for political ends, intimidation, is that terrorism?

What about war? Any war involves using violence to solve political problems, and it’s almost impossible to have wars that won’t lead to serious consequences for civilians, even if you’re on the defensive side of one.

In practice most people’s idea of terror groups doesn’t extend to governments (where terrorism and official militaries behaving with a similar or even greater)level of brutality are labelled differently) or at least not to recognised governments, ISIS was the “Islamic State” and was indeed a state, although one recognised by no other.

So terrorism is the use of serious violence (especially against civilians) for political ends (especially to intimidate) by an irregular force? Sure, we’re getting closer, but even then there’s the vibes issue. Every country, every community, every person, has a different idea of what groups count based on what causes they sympathise with and what methods they’re willing to turn a blind eye to or see as intolerable, making it ultimately a far too flexible, meaningless label, one I’ve only used sparingly because it’s just a common term.

But even that flexibility only goes so far and now I’ve seen one of the most ridiculous and worrying attempts to stretch it even further than Plastic Man can go, so much so that I’ve felt a need to break a 3 month hiatus in article releases¹ on ED to speak out about it.

The Power of a Label

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The reason I’m bringing this topic up again is my government has recently decided to designate a group called Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, through an order approved by a simple yes vote from parliament.

This comes with serious consequences, under the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 if a group is designated as a terrorist group it’s illegal for someone to be or claim to be a member of it, express a supportive belief that could encourage others to support it, to be involved in organising a meeting that supports the group or has a member of the group speaking at it, these are crimes that can land you with up to 14 years in prison. Wearing any clothing/”an article” (say, a banner) that could make someone reasonably suspect you’re a member/supporter of a “terrorist organisation” can get up to 6 months.

Funding a “terrorist” group or managing property belonging to one can also get you to 14 years, and if you’re a professional who knows that someone is doing that and fails to report it (say, a banker who knows someone with an account at your bank is funding a group) you can get up to 5 years.

Under another law, the Terrorism Act 2006, sharing a publication written by a terrorist group to encourage terrorism is a crime that can land you up to 15 years in prison.

Terrorism is defined in the Terrorism Act as serious violence/property damage/creation of health risk/electronic disruption/endangering life to influence the government (or an international gov org) or intimidate the public for an ideological cause, or action for the benefit of a proscribed terrorist organisation (whether they actually carry out terrorist actions or not).

So they have a definition of terrorism (that’s already quite broad, because few would consider property damage or cyber crimes “terrorism” on its own) but they then broaden it even further with that last part, that basically amounts to “if they’re on the list, they’re a terrorist”, “terrorism is what we say it is”.

But surprisingly this is a power that has been used fairly wisely for the 25 years it has existed, if you look at the list of banned terror orgs under the Act you’ll see many familiar names, the IRA, Al-Qaeda, Daesh (aka ISIS), who would be known to pretty much anyone, the PKK (who should be familiar if you’ve read my terror series), Atomwaffen Division and the Wagner PMC (who you should be familiar with if you’ve watched Ukrainian Divide), while these groups vary in ideology and location (some are UK based, some international, some are nationalist/separatist groups, some are Islamic extremists, some are Neo-Nazis) what they all have in common is militarism.

Almost all of them are militia or military groups of some kind, their tactics include shooting sprees, bombings and kidnappings and they’re willing to target civilians, either because they see them as complicit or to intimidate others.

The only outliers I noticed on the list were Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun (known on the list as “Al Ghurabaa” and “The Saved Sect”), which don’t carry out attacks themselves but do advocate for them, so the running thread all these groups have is violence and willingness to kill, either as a tactic of their own or a tactic they call others to do.

Which brings us to Palestine Action, and this is where that 25 years of wise use has ended.

Who PA Are

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Palestine Action is known as a “direct action” group, aimed at targeting the Israeli war machine and organisations they consider to be complicit in it, their main target has been an Israeli weapons company called Elbit Systems but other targets have included the French weapons and tech company Thales, local government bodies, financial institutions and most recently the UK’s Royal Air Force (the RAF), their attack on an RAF base being the catalyst for the government scrambling to blacklist them.

The group’s main tactic is vandalism, focusing on property damage (breaking windows, spraypainting) but they’ve also used “occupation” (aka squatting on a site) as well, the goal being to directly disrupt production/operations and cause financial pressures that push the companies to shut down and those invested in them to divest.

None of these tactics involve the use of violence at all and the government’s case against the group has focused on property damage, violence was mentioned as a secondary concern, with the UK’s Security Minister mentioning that the group has been willing to use violence and pointing to cases where they were charged with “violent disorder, grievous bodily harm with intent and aggravated burglary, which is an offence involving a weapon”.

And that’s true, while Palestine Action has been described as a peaceful group by many of its defenders their members have gotten into struggles with security staff and employees of the sites they target, as well as the police.

But it’s important to point out that they don’t seek those confrontations, it’s a reaction they get to their actual agenda, when you carry out vandalism attacks like these people will try to stop you and arrest you, you have a choice of letting that happen, attempting to flee or getting in a confrontation. Sometimes that middle option isn’t there, if you go in to spray a building and a security guard grabs you you can either let them do that (get you on the ground and hand you over to police) or you can shove them off (and continue the spray or run).

There’s a fundamental difference between something like this and deliberately targeting that guard, going in with the premeditated ambition of bashing him over the head.

So it’s basically a question of do you focus on their peaceful intentions, or the violent scuffles that sometimes break out?

Palestine Action absolutely is a criminal group (keep in mind when I say this, legality is not morality), something they don’t even hide or disagree with, their methods involve vandalism, squatting, trespassing, but this isn’t about whether they’re criminals or even whether they’re criminals willing to use violence, but whether they’re terrorists.

Because designating them as a terrorist group doesn’t just ban them, it places very serious restrictions on freedom of speech and expression for the whole population, anyone who seems to sympathise with them, who wears their logo, who says they’re a member even if they’re actually not, is risking serious jail time under terrorism charges.

On the first day of the ban 29 people were arrested in London for the crime of holding banners that said “I support Palestine Action” on them.

My Sympathies

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To be clear, I think that this kind of restriction shouldn’t even apply to supporters of actual terror groups, I don’t think you can arrest your way out of radicalisation, but especially applying it to supporters of a group like Palestine Action is to me an intense level of draconian overreach and abuse of power, using a law designed to stop violent insurgents to crack down on a protest group, it genuinely feels like one of the most disturbing authoritarian moments for this country in decades.

I can’t hide that some of my disgust for this is related to my sympathy for the group’s underlying motives, not the group itself but the use of direct action against the Israeli war machine.

Israeli forces have launched attacks that include a willingness to include large numbers of civilians in the crossfire (such as a recent airstrike on a cafe which killed at least 26 people that was apparently targeting a Hamas commander), deliberately killed civilians on numerous occasions, which has led to an ICC indictment against senior Israeli leaders for war crimes, destroyed about 80% of Gazan infrastructure (potentially even more, given that the 80% figure came out last year), imposed a severe stranglehold on aid to Gaza (which recently included an 11-week total blockade of all humanitarian resources and food shipments), and after that blockade turned aid distribution into a slaughterhouse, replacing UN based aid agencies with the dubiously named “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” supported by US security contractors, who alongside Israeli forces have shot at Palestinian civilians at or near aid sites.

As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, the Israeli defence minister has recently gone even further by suggesting that the entire population of Gaza should be moved to a so-called “humanitarian city” in its Rafah region, where they wouldn’t be allowed to leave. Gaza itself has been a blockaded region since 2005 and its population are already refugees many times over, many of their parents or grandparents are refugees from what is now Israel, having either been thrown out by Israeli forces or fled fearing for their lives in the 1940s, never allowed to return since, the recent war made them refugees dozens of times over again as they were forced to move back and forth throughout the strip as areas became unsafe, now there’s a serious risk that they’re going to be made refugees again and their prison walls will get even tighter.

That’s just Gaza, in the West Bank the Israeli military are facilitating raids of Palestinian land by Israeli settlers and upholding an apartheid style dual legal system where Israelis are mostly treated under civilian law and Palestinians under military law, with only a tiny section of Palestinian areas actually controlled by Palestinians themselves.

All this under orders from leaders who have very blatantly made statements that at their best call for ethnic cleansing and at worst incite genocide, who only seem to be constrained not by any humane values, but concerns about bad PR.

Not only is this barbaric in itself but it’s something not supported by the British public, the vast majority of people in the UK don’t support Israel’s war and don’t want us to be part of it yet our government doesn’t listen, although there’s been a partial arms ban on aid to Israel the rest of it continues, the government has also provided military training to Israeli forces and continues to run surveillance flights over Gaza.

So if they aren’t willing to reflect what the public want, denying them a peaceful democratic option of ending our support for this bloodletting, I can’t say I find anything wrong with people taking matters into their own hands.

Now I also can’t say that means I support Palestine Action itself, not only because I could be arrested if I did but also because I don’t know how effective their attacks are and how complicit their targets are, for example PA claimed that the RAF planes they damaged were connected to the spy flights over Gaza while another source I read claimed they’re actually used for counter-Daesh operations, it’s also been argued that although Elbit System’s UK branch is part of an Israeli company the weapons produced there are only made for the British military, not the Israelis (not that I would want our military taking weapons from them either way).

Reading through the debate about the group in parliament I also read an MP from the Green Party (a party very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause which opposed PA being labelled as terrorists) criticising one of the group’s founders for “words spoken […] at a rally in the aftermath of the 7 October Hamas attacks”. Although she didn’t explain the details of what this was I’m guessing it involves glorification of those attacks in some way, which I absolutely wouldn’t accept since I see October 7 as a terrorist attack that involved mass killing (and kidnapping) of civilians.

Overreach

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But fundamentally the ideological side of it doesn’t actually matter, another example that comes to mind for me is Extinction Rebellion. Extinction Rebellion are another direct action group (focused on climate rather than Palestine) and have been carrying out their strikes for years, doing things like blocking transport (sitting in roads and in one case on top of a train), spraypainting, chaining themselves to buildings and deliberately getting themselves arrested in large numbers to waste police time, and at the height of their campaign I had a very low opinion of them because their actions seemed to mostly involve inconveniencing ordinary people without actually making a serious difference.

Because of that I hadn’t even really looked into their messaging or rhetoric, so although I’m sympathetic to environmental concerns that didn’t translate to any sympathy for the group at all, but I’m very confident that even at my peak of anger towards them I would’ve never accepted them being branded as a terrorist group (which despite tightening protest laws more broadly at the time, the government at the time never did).

When Palestine Action were added to the list they were added alongside 2 other groups, the MMC (Maniacs Murder Cult) and the Russian Imperial Movement. The RIM I’ve already covered in my Ukrainian Divide documentary series, they’re a far-right militant organisation that runs militant training and has their own combat force involved in various international conflicts, and while I hadn’t heard of the MMC before this story, looking into them I quickly found they’re a Neo-Nazi group (with Slavic origins: Ukrainian/Russian, now international) that has extreme violence at its core, even judging members by a “points system” based on the violence they commit, you have to be violent to get in (carrying out assaults and murders) and you have to be violent to stay.

And in the parliamentary debate on the ban absolutely no one spoke out against labelling those other 2 groups as terrorists, with many who opposed the ban going out of their way to say they would’ve supported banning MMC and RIM if it was just those 2 and not Palestine Action up for a vote, or if they’d been able to vote on each of the groups separately.

Instead the government lumped them all together in one vote, with its security minister arguing that this was about an unbiased evidence based determination, if PA had used the same tactics but held a different ideology opponents of the ban would’ve agreed with it, obviously ignoring the fact that while many of the opponents of the ban mentioned their support for Palestine, most of the criticism focused on Palestine Action’s methods, which were criminal, but not terrorist.

A group like this is just totally out of place with groups on the terror list, using a law designed to stop violent insurgents to crack down on a protest group, it genuinely feels like one of the most disturbing authoritarian moments for this country in decades.

And it’s what has prompted me to draw a total red line on supporting this government or my MP again, as I mentioned in my democracy series I voted them with some serious reservations to get rid of the ruling Conservative Party, seeing them as a lesser evil with some potential to also do genuine good, but post-election I was starting to feel serious regrets, after corruption scandals, the arms ban on Israel only being partial and most recently scandals surrounding the benefits system (where the government has tried to chop out some of the most vulnerable from aid programs to save money) and now this.

This is the bit where I say yes, they have done genuine good and probably will do plenty more, but the evil is too much for me to stomach, I don’t see how I could vote for a candidate that supported falsely labelling an activist group struggling against a war machine of mass atrocity as a terrorist organisation, risking lengthy jail terms not just for people in that group, but anyone who doesn’t word their opinions about them carefully enough.

It’s just a disturbing fact that these powers are now on the books and the police will be expected to use them, and they will, I expect a semi low enforcement rate of this stuff because hopefully the police aren’t so stupid as to treat support for PA as seriously as for groups like Daesh, I really hope I don’t get proved wrong.

But either way my real hope is that the public don’t let their views on terror be defined by this cynical power play, they can crack down on people who don’t go along with their demands but they don’t get to define what words mean.

It’s a great demonstration of a point that’s come to my mind more often over the last few years, “rule of law”. Presented as a cornerstone of liberal democracy (which isn’t a democracy to begin with), the idea that we all have to be bound by the law, it’s mostly about the fair demand of expecting the state to follow its own rules, but it also expects the public to respect them too.

Well, I don’t, my respect for law comes from 2 places, when I actually agree with it and when I risk getting into deep trouble for not following it, there’s a much needed place for so many laws, but that doesn’t mean there’s a place for all of them. Respect is earned, and when law is less about safety and uplifting and more about raw power, I don’t have to give it.