State and Non-state Terrorism

In the present setting, however, state terrorism is apparently much more difficult to recognize. Discussions of terrorism in social sciences and in philosophy tend to focus on non-state terrorism. In common tongue and in the media, terrorism is as a rule expected to be an action of non-state agents in feature of the meaning of the word. If one suggests that the army or security services are doing the same things that, when done by insurgents (like the Taliban, ISIS), are invariably described and condemned as terrorist, the usual reply is: ‘But these are actions done on behalf of the state, in pursuit of legitimate state aims: the army, waging war, or the security services, fending off threats to our security.’

As far as everyday discourse and the media are concerned, this can perhaps be explained by two related tendencies. One is the widely shared assumption that, at least normally, what the state does has a certain kind of legitimacy, while those challenging it tend to be perceived as the forces of disorder and destruction, engaged in clearly unjustifiable pursuits. The other is the double ordinary of the form ‘us vs. them.’ In states facing insurrection, the general public and the media find themselves on the side of the state. This tends to affect the usage. An offshoot of this propensity is that when guerrillas abroad are sponsored by the Western Powers, CNN and the BBC trend to call them paramilitaries and freedom fighters rather than terrorists.

The focusing on non-state terrorism is given a different explanation: that whatever the similarities between state and non-state terrorism, the dissimilarities are more prominent and instructive. Walter Laqueur, a leading authority on the history and sociology of terrorism, tells us that the two ‘fulfil different functions and manifest themselves in different ways,’ and that ‘nothing is gained by ignoring the specifics of violence.’ If some acts of state agents are basically similar to and exhibit the same morally relevant traits as acts of non-state agencies commonly termed terrorist, that will clearly determine our moral understanding and evaluation of both. Thus philosophers have been less reluctant than political scientists to recognize and discuss state terrorism.

State-sponsored terrorism is worse, morally speaking than terrorism by non-state agents. The recent new exposé on Pakistan Today showing that the murder of Pakistan’s first ever Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was, in fact, an American supported act of terror is a perfect example of the argument. The US declassified these documents and assured that it had been meddling in Pakistan, literally from its inception. The targets, as the reports suggest, was Iranian oil, as it always has been. State-sponsored terrorism is far more correct, more heavily sponsored and more surgical than the religious terrorism that now confuses the Muslim world.

Muslim Minorities after 9/11

The 9/11 attacks had a direct and significant impression on people’s attitudes, resulting in an increase in discriminatory behaviour toward Muslim minorities in the western world. The existing empirical literature from the FBI relies on evidence that indicates dramatic increases in hate crimes against Muslims in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, not only in the US but also beyond its borders. Overall, 9/11 has fueled acts of anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim aggression and hostility in countries like The US, the UK and Germany.

The events of 9/11 contributed to the people's opposing views about immigration that are driven by factors other than economic self-interest in the United States and Europe. In view of skill shortages and population ageing in most Western societies, the policymakers aim to avoid anti-immigrant attitudes among the wider population. Several recent studies have consistently found a significant and positive relationship between education or skill levels among individuals and their views about immigration.

Evidence from aggregate time trends suggests that anti-Muslim sentiments and xenophobic aggression increased considerably among the US population in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The American-Arab Anti-Judgement Committee (2003) reports over 700 occurrences targeting Arab Americans or professed as such, including several murders. Human Rights Watch (2002) and Gould and Klor (2015) refer to data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), viewing a 16-fold increase in the reported total number of hate crimes against Muslims from 2000 to 2001.

Since 1992, the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) has been collecting data on crimes motivated by racial, religious, ethnicity/national-origin, sexual-orientation, and the disability bias. A hate crime is not defined as a separate type of crime. Rather, hate crimes are characteristic of crime like assault or burglary but are defined as a hate crime if the offender’s cause is based on a bias against the victim’s gender, race, etc. That is, a crime can be classified as a hate crime only if the police obtain additional information about the motives of the perpetrator, and using their judgment, determine that a biased motivation exists.

Hate crimes are reported to the FBI for eleven categories of offences, but the most common type by far is “intimidation.” In Appendix Table A3, we present the number of hate crimes against Muslims in 2001 for all eleven categories. The largest categories are “intimidation” with 53.4% of the total, “destruction/vandalism” with 24.2%, the two types of assault (simple and aggravated) with 16.2%, and arson with 3.3%. According to the UCR Hate Crime Report 2001, ‘hate crimes touch not only the individual victim, but they also affect the entire group associated with the particular bias motivation.’

Certain analyses show that the 9/11 attacks induced a backlash against the Muslim community which, in turn, increased the ethnic identity and demographic strength of the Muslim immigrant community in the United States. The results are not due to pre-existing trends in the assimilation outcomes of Muslim immigrants across states and are found to be robust to the inclusion or exclusion of a wide array of personal and state-level characteristics. Notably, Muslim immigrants are reacting specifically to hate crimes against Muslims. This supports the idea that 9/11 may have a long-term political and socio-economic impact, by creating a larger and more ethnically cohesive Muslim community in this generation and also the next. This has been termed as the new type of ‘backlash’. Existing models argue that extremist groups commit terror attacks with the goal of provoking a backlash in order to radicalize moderate supporters that reside in the same country as the perpetrators. Hence, the combination of both results suggests the existence of a potential feedback loop between Muslim demographic strength and discrimination against Muslims that reinforces itself over time.