Terrorist vs Religion P1

With regard to religious terrorism, Al Qaeda’s representation of the Arabian Peninsula as the spiritual home of Islam has provided the basis for its justification of the US as both an invading and infidel force.

The fourth wave of terrorism, roughly the 1990s to the present day, displays a continuation of this geographic trend but with a dramatic change in the motivation for terrorist activity. Rapoport (2001) claims that we are living in an era of religious terrorism; described as a fundamental shift and an unprecedented situation. Though focus in the US and Europe may simply identify religious terrorism with Islamic extremism, it is actually identified as a global phenomenon. Extremist Christian, Jewish, Sikh, and Buddhist groups have also been identified as advocating and committing acts of terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 2000).

A general trend in terrorism coverage is that western media are more likely to label Islamic violence as terrorism, as compared to Christian or Jewish violence (Nacos, 2002).

With a consideration of the fact that the 9/11 attacks and most of the post-9/11 terrorism acts have been committed by Islamic extremists, it is not surprising that Muslims are frequently portrayed in the media as perpetrators of terrorism. A largely ignored fact, however, is that most victims of terrorism operations are Arabs and Muslims (Perl, 2007; Stolbery, 2010).

Past research suggested that Islamic radical groups or those from the Middle East are more likely to be framed as terrorists than groups of other religions (e.g., Nagar, 2007). In an analysis of primary terrorist portrayals after 9/11 in major release film trailers, Middle Eastern or Arabic groups are the most frequently represented non-White ethnic groups, accounting for a third of the total primary portrayals (Ivory, Williams, Hatch, & Covucci, 2007). Similarly, Kalyango (2006) found that Islamic groups are the most frequently mentioned terrorist groups in the New York Times’ coverage of counter-terrorism efforts.

New published research this month

The comparison emerged with a vengeance in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, notably when the 2002 Rome Statute defined apartheid as a crime in 2002, and thereby shifted attention to the question of international law. In December 2019, the UN Committee on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination announced the opening of a review of Palestinian complaints that Israeli policies in the West Bank amount to apartheid (Staff, 2019).

In April 2021, Human Rights Watch became the first major international human rights organisation to accuse Israel of apartheid, calling for Israeli officials to be prosecuted under international law and for an investigation by the International Criminal Court. Amnesty International followed suit on 1 February 2022 (Holmes, 2021). There are worldwide some of the most renowned Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers from Israel, the United States and the European Union who share this conviction.

Israeli-born historian Omer Bartov, one of the most respected Holocaust and genocide researchers, states that ‘there can be for Jews in Israel no democracy as long as Palestinians live under what Israeli lawyers have characterized as an apartheid regime.’ (Goldberg, 2023).

Yet, there were enough similarities or approximations between ‘apartheid’ in South Africa and Israel to belong to the same family of settler colonialism, built on various forms of exclusion, exploitation, displacement and confinement. While apartheid as an ideological and governmental system was eventually dismantled in South Africa, in Palestine settler colonialism continues apace within a state that has adapted well to neoliberal economic imperatives and continues to receive almost unqualified support from the U.S. (Peteet, 2016).

Apartheid (meaning “apartness” in Afrikaans) was the legal system for racial separation in South Africa from 1948 until 1994 https://perma.cc/7SL8-W66X

The Struggle against Apartheid https://perma.cc/Y67R-LXZK