“This is how they fight”

Last night during a panel discussion at Barnard College, I heard choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women talk about what she called the “pitfalls” of the radical left politics she embraced in the ’70s. Mentioning the Black Panthers and other cultural nationalist groups, she spoke of her discomfort with “reducing people to generalities.” To paraphrase, Zollar felt she could not take part in the politics of dehumanization — exactly what the left had come into being to oppose.

Oddly, during this very exchange, Zollar mentioned that she doesn’t like the word “terrorist,” because “these are poor people, without means, and this is how they fight.” With that statement, Zollar reduced the global poor to generalities.

The Zapatistas of Mexico do not engage in terrorism, even though their constituency is extremely poor and without means. ETA, the Basque movement seeking independence from Spain and France, has carried out terrorist attacks for decades, yet there are people far more downtrodden than the Basques. The 9/11 hijackers were not poor or disadvantaged. Hamas, the IRA and the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka are highly sophisticated, heavily armed military organizations with international financing. In this August piece for openDemocracy, Zaid Al-Ali wrote about the sectarian militias currently plaguing Iraq:

Over the past few months, guerrillas have been flowing into Baghdad from the north, west and south and have started engaging each other with a view to eliminating each other from the streets of the capital. The groups that are engaged in this struggle are working to eliminate their rivals altogether, one neighbourhood at a time.
[…]
Somewhere in Baghdad, there are people peering over a map of the city and directing operations in the way that Russian and German commanders did in Stalingrad during the second world war.

This is how they fight, indeed. The point is that terrorists do not represent the poor and downtrodden; rather, they all too often make it their business to kill the poor and downtrodden.

Zollar is far from the only eloquent, sensitive, progressive, humanist individual to perpetuate the myth that terrorism is the one option left to the powerless. That this view is so widely accepted on the left is an intellectual and moral calamity. The unbearably crude right-wing response to 9/11 — and the cooptation of human rights rhetoric by the rights-abusing Bush administration — has prevented the left from seeing that terrorism is in fact a human rights issue.

P.S. — By “the left” I do not mean the Democrats, and I know that I’ve been all but silent on the upcoming midterm elections. I hope to rectify that in the coming days.