Almost every morning, I wake up, unlock my phone, and open the news, and almost every day there is another attack somewhere in the world. In the last three days alone three Americans killed in Syria. Fifteen Jews murdered in Australia. Five men arrested in Germany for plotting to ram Christmas markets. The locations change, the casualties change, the headlines change, but the pattern does not. There is a steady, relentless stream of ideologically driven violence that modern governments prefer to file under the vague label of “terrorism,” as if the category itself explained anything.

Nothing in modern political vocabulary is as hollow, overused, and under-defined as the word “terrorism.” It is a category that pretends to illuminate but actually conceals. A bureaucratic convenience that functions as a moral anesthetic. A word that allows governments to condemn violence without naming the worldview that produced it.

Before the twentieth century, political violence was described by ideology, not abstraction. When an anarchist bombed a government building, he was not labeled by his method; he was labeled by his worldview. When Bolsheviks assassinated ministers or fascists marched on Rome, their acts were understood as extensions of their ideologies. The actor and the doctrine were inseparable.

That clarity collapsed precisely when Islamic movements began to articulate a global political-theological project in the late twentieth century. Rather than naming the ideology that animated this violence, Western governments and institutions retreated into vagueness. They invented a category, “terrorism,” that could condemn the act without confronting its doctrinal source.

There were geopolitical reasons for this. Arab alliances mattered. Oil mattered. Diplomatic sensitivity mattered. Washington did not want to alienate allies across the Muslim world, and Europe had already entangled itself in complex migration and energy dependencies. Naming the ideology would trigger political crises; avoiding it offered stability.

Thus emerged the linguistic escape hatch:........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)