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‘How the ‘Terrorist’ Label is Used to Shut down Grievances and Ignore Human Rights – and is Less About How You’re Fighting, Than Who’

Why Israel has a ‘right to defend’ itself, but Iran’s ‘revenge’ does not qualify as ‘self-defence’. Unpicking the double standards playing out in Western media

Journalists are seen on a Hezbollah-led media tour in Dahiyeh, southern Beirut, viewing the damage following almost two weeks of air strikes in the area by the Israeli military. Photo: ZUMA Press Inc / Alamy
Journalists are seen on a Hezbollah-led media tour in Dahiyeh, southern Beirut, viewing the damage following almost two weeks of air strikes in the area by the Israeli military. Photo: ZUMA Press Inc / Alamy

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A sovereign nation’s “right to defend itself” is the mantra of the Middle East war, the carte blanche for Benjamin Netanyahu’s expanding bloodlust.

But it was not transferred from Israel to Iran when missiles were launched towards Jerusalem and Tel Aviv this week. Instead, it was “Iran’s wrath”, “Revenge from above”, “Blitz at Israel” that blazoned Britain’s front pages – along with reaffirmation of Israel’s “right to defend”.

The missiles, we were told, were retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader.

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Hezbollah – a Shia group that is armed and financed by Iran – was first formed in response to Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982.

Like Israel, Lebanon is also a sovereign nation with a “right to defend itself”. And just hours before these missiles were launched into Israel, Israel invaded Lebanon once again.

So how come Iran’s “revenge” does not, in the eyes of Western media, qualify as “self-defence”? Perhaps because Hezbollah is labelled a terrorist organisation by the UK, US, and EU.

A status jarringly at odds with its integral role in Lebanese democracy – Hezbollah won the biggest share of votes in Lebanon’s 2022 general election. “You cannot actually speak about Lebanese politics without including Hezbollah,” said Lebanese journalist and news anchor Zahera Harb.

‘One man’s terrorist…’ you know the saying. This is not a statement of justification, but one of cause and effect. There is reason to call Hezbollah, like Hamas in Gaza, terrorist organisations; there is also reason to call them resistance groups.

Over a million people have already been displaced from Lebanon amid underreported numbers of civilian deaths caused by Israeli air strikes. Hezbollah would not exist if this were not a repeat of history, just as Hamas would not exist if not for millions of Palestinians’ statutory humiliation in the open-air prison that was Gaza.

In such conditions, violent rebellion is guaranteed – history is very consistent with that lesson. But instead of learning, we use the term ‘terrorist’ to shut down inquiry.

‘Terrorist’ is not just a legal definition. It is an excuse to disengage, ignore valid grievances, refuse to negotiate, and bypass human rights.

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When we label someone as a terrorist, we turn a blind eye towards whatever motivates them as a human being. This is why Media Storm decided to speak to people who have, themselves or their relatives, been convicted as terrorists and ask them: why violence?

This episode was an inquiry into terrorism and a case that doing so apolitically is not only a journalist’s right but a journalist’s imperative.

Tony Doherty joined the Irish Republican Army after British troops open-fired on a peaceful march on what became known as Bloody Sunday, killing his father and 12 others.

While in prison for enrolling in a terrorist group, he fixated “on the fact that the soldier who killed my father hadn’t spent a single day in prison for the murder of five innocent people within 15 minutes, and yet here – the son of one of those murdered people – was classed as a criminal.”

“‘Terrorist’ is a heavily weighted emotional and propaganda term used by states,” he said. “What I witnessed growing up was state terrorism”.

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Similarly, former president of the United Afghan Peace Movement Gulwali Passarlay, who saw loved ones killed by US forces in Afghanistan, said: “I still see the US’ actions as terrorist activities because they terrorised people. You can’t have it both ways.”

When Gulwali’s dad fought in the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union, he was seen by the West as a ‘freedom fighter’, “but when the same Mujahideen fought the US they became terrorists”.

Female Kurdish fighters resisting ISIS in 2014 won CNN’s ‘Most Inspirational Women of the Year’ award. Some years later, when fighting Turkey, their media title took a different tinge: “Terrorists with highlights”.

“I am used to the West trying to change the narrative”, Gulwali said. “The ‘terrorist’ label is less about how you’re fighting than who you’re fighting”.

Editorial word choices subconsciously shape our views. Whether we call a group a ‘resistance’ or a ‘militia’ shapes listeners’ ideas of whether it’s right or wrong. 

An ‘army’ (like Israel’s), an ‘invading force’ (like Russia’s). A ‘conflict’ (as in Gaza), an ‘illegal war’ (as in Ukraine).

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When Zahera was reporting for the BBC on the invasion of her native Lebanon in the nineties, she was not allowed to refer to Lebanon’s military operation against the occupying army as ‘a resistance’, she had to call them ‘militias’ – a word that stripped her nation of its lawful right to self-defence. “And it was all for the sake of ‘impartiality’”.

Hence, she has become an outlier in British journalism education for teaching her students that “objectivity” is geographically subjective, “inherited from the Western doctrine of what journalism is about”. 

This brings us to what Kishore Mahbubani dubs “the Anglo-Saxon media problem”. The twice UN Security Council President told Media Storm: “When I arrive in [the West] and I turn on the news, I feel I’ve been cut off from the rest of the world. It’s such an insular, self-absorbed, self-referential discourse that takes place”.

He points out that those of us confined to Western world views are a minority 12% of the total global population, and yet “make absolutely no effort to understand why 88% of people view the world so differently”.

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Western media and leaders, to whom Israel is a key ally against competing interests in the Middle East, have painted the war as a geopolitical story in which there is an ally and an enemy, a sovereign and a terrorist.

This conceals from their populations the complex human reality in which truth and justice coexist across binaries. We did not produce an episode on terrorism to legitimise one side over another but to question the gulfs separating our world view from others.

Because the only ones who win from irreconcilable world views are the mongerers and profiters of war.

Media Storm’s episode ‘One man’s terrorist’ is out now.



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