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By Edward S. Herman 

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The powerful control language as well as policy and its institutional apparatus. The two are of course closely interrelated. If the powerful can successfully label their targets “terrorists,” it is easier to put in place policies to slaughter them. With a sufficiently compliant media system you can make yourself into a victim engaging in “self defense” even as you attack a virtually disarmed country across the ocean by “shock and awe” tactics openly designed to terrorize the target population into submission. Killing and terrorizing via helicopter gunships and assorted bombs from the air and search and destroy operations and invasions and terrorization of households is not terrorism. By the internalized rule of the compliant media, according to which invidious language applies only to others, this clear terrorization does not make you a terrorist. On the other hand, the resistance is quickly found to be terrorist by its use of IEDs, suicide bombers, and other weapons of the weak. 

This internalized double standard also applies to word usage in reporting on the Israeli, Palestinian, and Hezbollah conflict. Israel may openly acknowledge an effort to frighten and intimidate Gaza residents by violent attacks and threats of attacks—even including deliberate noise creation by jets producing terrifying sonic booms through the night (“I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza,” Ehud Olmert) and a planned increase in Palestinian hunger (“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” Dov Weisglass). 

Israel’s systematic bombing of civilian sites in Lebanon has even been explained in part as an effort to cause the victim civilians to rise up against Hezbollah—a standard Israeli practice going back at least 25 years when former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban admitted to having bombed civilians in the hope that the “afflicted populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities.” But even though this fits Benjamin Netanyahu’s own definition of terrorism—“the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends”—the Israelis are not terrorists, they are fighting terror, by their own preferred usage and the double standard rule, which applies to U.S. clients as well as the United States itself. 

It is possible to get around this seeming disconnect between the definition of terrorism and exemption of our side from designation as terrorist by claiming that those civilians our side attacks are not “innocent.” This is based on the fact that large numbers of civilians frequently support the resistance, are the “sea” in which the terrorist “fish” swim or are “willing executioners” supporting a government that we have declared evil and made into a target. In these cases the drying out of the “sea” or killing of the willing executioners can be made to seem reasonable or at least acceptable—these civilians are “unworthy victims,” so that treating them ruthlessly is nothing to get upset about. A good propaganda system will keep these victims largely out of sight and not display the indignation the media reserve for the victims of target states and “terrorists.” This was true in the Vietnam War, where several million civilians were killed and seriously injured; and in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Lebanon where the Israelis have sometimes “warned” civilians of imminent bombing, but sometimes bombed them in flight or blocked their exit routes and have made it clear that the civilians in South Lebanon are an intolerable “sea” helping the Hezbollah “fish” or are themselves all terrorists (“All those now in South Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah,” Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon, July 27, 2006). 

On the other hand, civilians in the United States and Israel are always innocent and never willing executioners. Their governments may kill and terrorize vast numbers, and having nominally democratic governments these citizens could be said to have given their approval to the killing and terrorization (in contrast with civilians in say, Afghanistan, who were living under a dictatorship). But in the propaganda system U.S. and Israeli citizens are still innocent because their governments only kill for good reason, in “self defense” against terrorists or to prevent people like Saddam Hussein from using his weapons of mass destruction or giving them to terrorists. 

It is also always a part of the word usage and framing process that the “terrorists started it,” by their past terrorist actions and more recently by “provocations.” The United States and its allies and clients never engage in “provocations,” by media rule, but also because anything our side might have done which might be a provocation by the enemy is normalized. This is partly because being good and always in the right by patriotic assumption it is acceptable that we or our clients do things that the bad guys shouldn’t do because they are bad. The perfect illustration can be found in the events leading to the reinvasion and further devastation of Gaza by Israel since June 26, 2006. 

The excuse for the reinvasion was the Palestinian capture of an Israeli soldier, corporal Gilad Shalit, on June 25. This led to an outcry and outrage by Israel at this clear provocation, and the U.S. mainstream media featured this seizure and created the impression that it was a serious provocation indeed. They even followed Israeli usage in calling this a “kidnapping,” although the victim was a uniformed soldier and member of an armed force that regularly attacks the Gaza population. Furthermore, on the previous day (June 24), the Israelis had crossed into Gaza and seized two Palestinian civilians who they declared to be members of Hamas. Now arguably this was a genuine “kidnapping,” and also a clear “provocation” that on provocation logic would justify the Palestinian capture (or responsive “kidnapping”) of Shalit. But the media played this strictly according to the applicable double standard rules: (1) they mainly didn’t even mention the Israeli action, leaving the seizure of Shalit as the only relevant fact; (2) they allowed Shalit to have been “kidnapped” rather than taken prisoner in a military conflict; (3) when on the rare occasion they mentioned the Israeli action of the previous day they failed to elevate it to “provocation” and even rationalized it as a legitimate “arrest” (Washington Post). The Israelis, engaged in an illegal occupation, violating scores of UN rulings and the Fourth Geneva Convention and committing war crimes on a daily basis, have a right to “arrest” any Palestinian, but Palestinians have no right to reply in kind. 

The main trick here is to cut off “provocations” just at the point that justifies the actions of “our” side. If there is a steady flow of attacks and counterattacks, stop just at the helpful point. This process underlies the development of the convenient distinction between terrorism and “retaliation.” The propaganda system rule is to stop at the violent action of the bad guys, make the responsive violence by our side “retaliation,” and ignore any evidence that the bad guys were “retaliating” for something our side had done. There are thousands of illustrations of this cut-off process in serving to make the proper villains terrorists, of which the Shalit case just discussed is merely the latest example. One of my favorite illustrations is Paul Berman’s analysis in Terror and Liberalism where he has everything starting with suicide bombing in Israel—“Our current predicament was brought upon us by acts of suicide terrorism”—leading to Israeli retaliation. The Israeli Elik Elhanan, formerly in the Israeli Special Forces, whose sister died in a suicide bombing attack in 1997, says, “She died because there is an occupation.” For Berman, the occupation, the prior several decades-long racism, largescale ethnic cleansing, a ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths of 20-1 or higher in the years before the suicide bombings, and the 1,000 Palestinian deaths in the first Intifada, during which there were no suicide bombings, all disappear as he makes the cutoff necessary to protect Israeli terrorism. 

And, of course, the “root cause” in Lebanon turns out to be Hezbollah and its strong position in southern Lebanon. By rule of affiliation Hezbollah is a “terrorist” organization that threatens Israel, although it is in no way capable of invading or devastating Israel as Israel has done to Lebanon. But it can resist Israel and in the case of a possible further U.S.-Israeli aggression—against Iran—Hezbollah capability of inflicting damage on Israel might put a crimp in that further “birth pang” to bring the new order to the Middle East. It should be noted, though, that Hezbollah only came into existence in the wake of Israel’s 1982 invasion and occupation of Lebanon, as a means of defense against Israeli brutality. This means that the “root cause” of the Hezbollah threat lies in Israeli policy. This line of thought on root causes violates the rules mentioned above: only the other side terrorizes, and we must carefully stop the tracing of cause and effect at the point where our side must retaliate to their “terrorism.” The state terrorism of the IDF, killing 1,000 civilians and putting to flight a million civilians, does not make Israel a terrorist state, by rule of proper language usage. 

As noted earlier it is also part of the language of power that the United States was engaging in “self defense” in attacking Afghanistan and Iraq and that Israel is also just defending itself in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. However, in neither the Afghan nor Iraq case was the United States meeting the standards for an appropriate self-defense response laid out in the UN Charter, hence in both cases it was a legal case of aggression in violation of the Charter. It didn’t meet any substantive case either, as neither country had attacked the United States or threatened to do so. The basis for the attack on Afghanistan was the claim that bin Laden and Al Qaeda had attacked this country from a base in Afghanistan. No proof was offered to the Afghan government that this was so, and apparently none was available at the time of the attack. In any case, “self defense” was in no sense the basis for these attacks, but that didn’t prevent their support at home or eventual acceptance by the leaders of most states and the UN. 

The Institutional Counterpart 

The powerful control many levels of institutions (corporate, mass media, government, international), which is the source of their power and domination. I want to focus here, briefly, on their domination of UN responses to violence. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the UN’s response was aggressive and an armed force was soon employed to oust him, after which Iraq was subjected to deadly sanctions and forced to pay reparations. Yugoslavia was also subjected to sanctions and then a bombing war, and its leaders were brought to trial in a specially organized tribunal to deal with their alleged war crimes. In these cases the United States and its allies opposed the parties subjected to these aggressive UN responses and supported harsh action. 

On the other hand, when the United States invaded Vietnam and attacked Cambodia and Laos, killing millions and ravaging the entire Indochinese peninsula, the UN didn’t lift a finger. The U.S. mass media never once referred to the U.S. attack on Indochina as “aggression;” it was a struggle to protect “South Vietnam”—a U.S. creation in which the indigenous population had to be crushed into submission to a U.S.-imposed “leader”—against an alleged North Vietnamese, or Chinese or Soviet or generalized “communist” aggression. The UN and “international community” never contested this Orwellian word usage or did anything to contain the aggressor or protect its millions of victims. 

In short, the de facto double standard antedates the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a superpower-dominated world. But now, without even the containing effects of a relatively weak and cautious rival, the superpower has been able to run wild: ignoring the UN Charter with serial aggressions, whip-sawing and making a laughing stock of the UN, but getting it to ratify its invasion-occupation of Iraq (Security Council Resolution 1511 of October 16, 2003), and, while improving its own nuclear arsenal and threatening to attack Iran, getting the UN to issue deadlines to the threatened country that are similar to those given Iraq which set the stage for that earlier aggression. Its preeminent client, Israel, has also been freer to ethnically cleanse in its occupied territories, enlarge and consolidate its illegal settlements on the West Bank and take over Jerusalem, and terrorize and impoverish its Palestinian victims. 

Focusing here on the Lebanon invasion and UN response, we may note that although Israel was violating the UN Charter in attacking Lebanon, was openly attacking its civilian population and infrastructure, and was using cluster bombs in violation of international law—UN official Jan Egeland was especially outraged that it used them heavily in the 72 hours before the ceasefire and Human Rights Watch found the density of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon the greatest it had ever seen—at no point has it been suggested that Israel be threatened under Section VII of the UN Charter for these gross legal violations. Section VII, which allows the use of force to end threats to international peace and security, is what the United States regularly strives to bring into play for its targets like Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iran, or Hezbollah, but as regards Israel the matter isn’t even up for debate given the double standard rules. Nor could a ceasefire even be insisted on, despite the open attacks on civilians and deliberate creation of a huge refugee exodus (such as provoked hysterical outcries and calls for a more aggressive response by the media, NATO officials, and UN representatives during the 78-day bombing war against Yugoslavia in 1999). The ceasefire was stalled because the United States and Israel wanted Israel to be able to achieve its military and political objectives in its aggression, which required a very large quota of civilian killings and destruction. 

The ceasefire finally negotiated made an almost complete accommodation to the interests of the aggressor and its partners, and tries to accomplish by the negotiated settlement what Israel failed to achieve by force of arms. UN Security Council Resolution 1701 does not condemn Israel for its major UN charter violation and assorted crimes, and does not suggest that Israel should pay reparations for its immense destruction, as Iraq was made to pay for its attack on Kuwait (1701 calls on the “international community” to help the stricken Lebanon). It doesn’t even insist that Israel immediately stop all action and get out of the invaded and severely damaged country—it must merely cease its “offensive” actions, which will allow continued Israeli offensive actions, as Israel can always claim its operations to be defensive and based on “provocations.” Only Hezbollah is required to terminate all military actions entirely: it is implicitly the aggressor (1701 says that the violence has escalated “since Hezbollah’s attack on Israel on 12 July, 2006”); no differentiation is made in the scale of violence (which “has already caused hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides”) and no party is named responsible for “extensive damage to civilian infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons.” These evasions help the authors of 1701 make Israel the victim requiring protection.

The UN Resolution calls for the “unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers,” but it is only “encouraging the efforts aimed at urgently settling the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel,” in accord with the power rules on provocations and the locus of root causes. 

Only Hezbollah, an “armed group,” is required to disarm under 1701 and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is only authorized to take “all necessary action” to ensure that the areas under its mandate are not the source of “hostile activities.” Israel is not an area within its mandate. There will be no international forces placed in Israel to assure that no “hostile activities” are begun there, and the aggressor that has invaded Lebanon on a regular basis since 1978 does not have to disarm. The Resolution calls for an international arms embargo, but only for supply to “armed groups” in Lebanon, and UNIFIL is to help enforce that arms embargo. Kofi Annan has already visited Syria to try to persuade that country’s leaders to terminate any supplies sent to Hezbollah, but there is no hint that he or anybody else is concerned with the U.S. resupply of Israel’s cluster bombs and other weapons that it might use in a further attack on Lebanon. 

In short, the parallel between the effect of power on the perversion of language and institutional behavior is very close. For the powerful, in this case Israel and its sponsor, aggression has no penalty, in accord with the power-language rule that their attacks are only “self defense,” nor do Israel’s massive war crimes elicit any action—only plaintive cries of the victims and some human rights organizations whose cries do not translate into meaningful action. As regards the resistance, however, as “terrorists” and by power-language rule “provokers” of the violence, they are the “root cause” and 1701 is designed to provide the basis for disarming them and protecting Israel from their violence. As 1701 is vague, if its implementation does not result in the actual disarming of Hezbollah, this would justify the aggressor country’s renewed attack on Lebanon. 

So the UN and “international community” are doing their Kafka-era work once again, failing to contain or punish blatant aggression when it is done by the powerful—as it so frequently is in the new world order—and even allowing these perpetrators of violence to shape the international response. That response is zero penalties for major crimes and a mobilization of the UN and international community to facilitate further violence by the criminals.