Dylann Roof appears in court: A Washington Post writer argues against calling him a “terrorist.”
Corporate media are demonstrably reluctant to use the word “terrorist” with regards to Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof–even though the massacre would seem to meet the legal definition of terrorism, as violent crimes that “appear to be intended…to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”
Generally, news outlets don’t explain why they aren’t calling Roof a terrorist suspect; they just rarely use the word. But the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump gave it a shot in a piece headlined “Why We Shouldn’t Call Dylann Roof a Terrorist” (6/19/15), and his rationale is worth taking a look at.
Bump starts out by acknowledging that “a terroristic act, which this was, is treated and identified differently when the actor is a young white man.” He contrasts the treatment of the Charleston massacre with the attack on the Mohammad cartoon contest in Texas:
In each case, someone hoping to prove a political point attacked a gathering because of who was in attendance. In the case where the only deaths were the attackers, we call it terrorism. In the case where the only deaths were the innocent people, we debate it.
“But,” Bump then says, “we shouldn’t call Dylann Roof a terrorist.” His argument for this:
Roof wants to be a terrorist—for us to admit that he terrorized us. He likes the attention, telling the police as he admitted to his acts that he wanted to make sure they were “known.”… What if we just call him a racist, grotesque person. What if we laughed at him instead of telling him he scared us?
This makes as much sense as arguing that you shouldn’t charge someone with kidnapping because the person they abducted wasn’t a kid. “Terrorism” is the name of a crime, and the relevant question isn’t whether we like the etymology of the term, but whether the murders fit the elements of the definition—which has to do with intent to intimidate or coerce, not with whether anyone actually felt “terror.”
On some level, Bump understands that “terrorism” is a legal term with serious legal consequences, and that the fact that it’s unevenly applied based on the race and religion of the perpetrators is a real problem:
When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested in Boston in 2013, the debate was over how to treat him given that he was a terror suspect—as manifested by Sen. Lindsey Graham—not over whether or not he was a terror suspect. That’s part of why Tsarnaev and the Texas cartoon attackers were so quickly identified as terrorists.
This, Bump notes, “reflects the same racial chasm that Roof wanted to exacerbate.”
He also notes that the word has become politicized by the “War on Terror”—“which is, in essence, a war on certain groups of Middle Easterners and Muslims.” As Bump observes, “Calling more non-American people terrorists also serves to bolster the arguments of those calling for more military intervention.” Which leads him to conclude that “the problem…isn’t that we’re too slow to call Roof a terrorist. It’s that we’re often too quick to call everyone else a terrorist.”
Yet Bump doesn’t seem to have written a column about how “we’re too quick to call everyone else a terrorist”; he didn’t seem to have any problem referring to the Boston Marathon bombing as “terrorism,” for example. (“The key component to any terrorist attack is luck” was the lead sentence for a piece he wrote on the Tsarnaev brothers, for instance—The Wire, 4/22/13.) So why write this piece, urging people to do what most journalists are already doing—avoiding saying “terrorism” in connection to Charleston?
Washington Post‘s Philip Bump: “When I see Dylann Roof, I remember being a white male his age”
The answer seems to be in a remarkably revealing passage in the middle of the piece, where Bump acknowledges that he identifies with Roof because they share a skin color:
Most Americans are white, and we see white people like ourselves. When I see Dylann Roof, I remember being a white male his age, barely out of my teenage years and experiencing weird anger in a difficult time…. We can identify much more easily with who he is.
Huh. You would think a self-respecting journalist, recognizing this kind of irrational bias in himself, would try to avoid letting it influence his work—would certainly not want to call for giving a criminal suspect special journalistic treatment based on this identification. Yet there’s not really any other explanation offered in the column as to why it was written about Roof and not about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Bump closes his column by rejecting the arguments that referring to the Charleston massacre as “racial terrorism” would “help…America come to terms with the fact that the ideology he assumed is dangerous and urgent” and put Roof in line for stiffer penalties. “Fine,” he says—but
each of these is predicated on our insistence that terrorism is somehow a higher order of evil than simply murdering elderly people for being black even as they held their Bibles in a church. It implies that his mass murder was one thing, but that his scaring us was made things more problematic. Perhaps we should demonstrate to him—and every other angry young man like him—that we aren’t scared of his dumb Internet rhetoric. Not in the least.
And let’s reel in our use of the word “terrorism” back in.
Let me note parenthetically that the law constantly takes intent into account—it’s the difference between murder and manslaughter, to name just one example—so suggesting that there’s something odd about taking the intent of a murder into account is specious.
But the real debate here is not about whether terrorism is worse than mass murder with no political motive; it’s whether we’re going to call some acts of politically motivated murder “terrorism” while withholding that label from other murders that are equally politically motivated—when we know that this label has real consequences, legally and politically.
“We aren’t scared by his dumb Internet rhetoric,” says Bump. If he’s still using “we” to mean “white people like ourselves,” it is certainly true that whites generally don’t feel personally afraid of white supremacist terrorist who target African-Americans. They’re much more likely to be afraid of Muslim terrorists who target Americans in general—even though right-wing extremists (not all of whom are white supremacists, of course) killed five times as many people in this country as Muslim extremists in the decade after 9/11, according to a study from the US Military Academy (New York Times, 6/16/15).
If you really think the word “terrorism” is being used too much, you should argue against it in the cases where it’s actually frequently used—which is mostly in cases involving Muslim suspects. But that would mean going against conventional wisdom, possibly with some professional cost. To argue instead that journalists are right to avoid the label with regard to a suspect with whom “we can identify much more easily”—well, there’s never much of price to be paid for endorsing institutional prejudices.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
You must have missed this:
#NYTimes Is Fine With Calling Shootings #Terrorism http://bit.ly/1GyhKaD
How about the media stop printing the names of terrorists and spree killers, since we know some of what they want is fame.
Stop giving terrorists and murders the fame they desperately desire!
Newsflash for Mr. Bump (numerous expletives deleted); most Americans are NOT white,. We crossed that line, and that is what has people like you so freaked out.
I grew up white in apartheid Miss’ssippi, with a daddy as a member of the White Citizens’ Council
And I don’t identify with Dylann Roof in any way, shape, manner or form.
I don’t know Bump’s lineage, but I have to wonder how he comes to make the connection between “experiencing weird anger in a difficult time” and a racist act of terror.
I suspect he’d have a harder time identifying with a Muslim experiencing grief and rage at the death of family and friends that induces him to attempt to extract “a tooth for a tooth”.
He’s hardly alone in that, of course.
We love FAIR. But this “terrorist” trope needs to be jettisoned. Look up Kevin Alexander Gray, a South Carolina civil rights activist and community organizer who edited the book “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence” on DemocracyNow schooling on that subject in a deep way.
Evidently Bump is more concerned with the the reactions of a murdering terrorist to the term than he is being clear and consistent in informing the public. I don’t care if a Root gets his jollies or not. I do care that white terrorists always get a pass in a media because it is that systemic racial bias that’s at the core of the problem here.
Mr. Bump obviously sees himself as representative of “America” and anyone who he perceives as unlike himself is a foreigner, or not-American, regardless of citizenship. In this context terrorists are defined as anyone not like Mr. Bump who want to kill Bump-like Americans. Bump-like Americans who kill foreigners, (anyone not like Bump) must be either hero’s or randomly acting psychotic Bump-like people who just couldn’t suppress their homicidal rage against foreigners as Mr. Bump admitted he was able to do as a young man. History shows clearly that the most extraordinary evils are committed by the most ordinary persons acting in response to and in conjunction with normalized values. Dehumanizing attitudes and behaviors have long been the norm in the U.S. amongst Bump like people against non-bump-like people. When a Bump-like American acts accordingly, or takes the next step, other Bump-like Americans have some regret regarding the method but little regret regarding the message. If we read between the lines here clearly Mr. Bump’s problem with applying the word terrorist is really a problem about denying the murderer the status of hero or random psychotic killer. It’s usually the latter in public for PR reasons and the former in their hearts and whispered in the shadows if they were to be honest with themselves. The label of terrorist would deny both hero and random psychotic designation for the killer and for Mr. Bump and all Bump-like people this would be the worst outcome to bestow on one of their own. They couldn’t even be secretly proud of a terrorist.
What Roof represents and what Bump apparently identifies with is called WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE. Yes, you can be a skinny kid and still have an enormous sense of entitlement; it’s assumed that Bump possesses this ugly vice.
People are very hesitant to call such things “terrorism” because it brings in all sorts of legal complications for “people like themselves” — such as the “material support” laws. If we call it terrorism, the parents who gave him money that he used to buy a gun could be guilty of “material support” even if they did not know his intent — just as we have prosecuted people who have given to Muslim charities that were implicated with “material support”.
It’s not just identity issues, it’s legitimate fear of legal consequences.
Philip Bump is unknowingly making himself the spokesperson for the racism denial problem. “I’m white; therefore everybody else is white (except for a few of those different people in the corner). Dylann Roof is white as well, therefore I can totally relate to his anger and racism.” REALLY???
“What if we just call him a racist, grotesque person. What if we laughed at him instead of telling him he scared us?” … what if you just tried and tried and tried REAL HARD to pull what passes for your head out of the place where you do most of your “thinking” … hmmmmm?
Propaganda terms such as “terrorist” are used to camouflage the racism that naturally exists in the right-wing state. Skin color and fear are simply another means of controlling a disgruntled population trapped in a declining empire…
Kind of left out the horrible part of his column:
“What if we throw him into prison for the rest of his life and forget about him and his desperate jacket and his desperate license plate and his desperate, terrible life?”
Maybe we should remind him how horribly racist the prison system is?
Bump seems to be an op-ed writer, for a newspaper that employs few if any journalists. That it is the WashPo makes it little or no different than (almost?) any other mainstream US newspaper.
I don’t know what to call Roof other than a cowardly racist murderer. But the material he posted various places on-line makes his acts seem to me to be his own little contribution to genocide. That was the end he sought and he went out and did his little part. A thoroughly evil, vicious, cowardly racist shitheart.
When I first read Bump’s column the other day I could not believe the extreme idiocy of it, and now I suspect the extreme idiocy is part and parcel of the man himself.
Two of the things in particular that get me are…
“Roof wants to be a terrorist—for us to admit that he terrorized us.”
And Bump wants to let poor widdle Roofy-Boy to not have to be called that, because that the poor widdle misunderstood baby wins!
What a load of hogwash, not to mention very bizarre and frankly extremely unintelligent thinkingI
And then there’s this whopper…
“When I see Dylann Roof, I remember being a white male his age, barely out of my teenage years and experiencing weird anger in a difficult time…. We can identify much more easily with who he is.”
Well, I don’t if Bump grew up as a neo-Nazi or a Klan member (my money’s on the latter), but I was once a white male of 21 and I know I probably got angry at one point, but, gee, I don’t remember even remotely thinking about killing 9 black people in a church.
Let me just think about that for a sec… let’s see… killing… black people… church…? Nope, I’m pretty sure I never thought about that then (or ever).
But if Bump did, then I think we know where the problem truly is.
If the white power movement gives out awards for justifying racism, I think Bump will be a shoo-in for the 2015 award!