Terrorism and War
There is a war being waged today against the people of African America by the US government, as evidenced by last night’s sniper attack in Dallas which resulted in 12 police officers shot, five of them dead.
Definition of terrorism President Barak Obama defined terrorism as the deliberate targeting of civilians, non-combatants, for military attacks for the purpose of striking fear in the population of one’s enemy. In lieu of its own clear definition of terrorism, the United Nations General Assembly, referring to acts of terrorism said: “Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them” (UN General Assembly, 1994).
Terrorism is a form of war which is distinguished from other forms of war by the fact of its targeting unarmed people, people who are not consciously trying to engage in war, often people who did not know there was a war until they were attacked. An example of the latter is the Panamanian civilians annihilated in the US invasion of that country (1989) to capture its former friend/ally Manuel Noriega: These civilians were unaware, until after they were slaughtered, that there was a war.
President Obama is being hypocritical when he fails to identify the wave of police murders of unarmed, non-combatant African Americans, both women and men, as acts of terrorism. By all standards, even those enunciated by him, this military campaign, directed at a civilian population, meets the exact criteria for determining a military act to be an act of terrorism.
Definition of war A military conflict is generally considered to be that of war when there are two armed combatant forces. There are numerous forms of war, such as positional warfare, guerrilla warfare, state-to-state wars, imperialist wars, wars for independence and national liberation from colonial rule, wars waged by states against non-state organizations, civil wars, and nuclear wars, to name a few. The reason why the people of the world have identified the Untied States of America as the most terrorist organization in the history of humankind — succeeding where Hitler failed, in a seven-decades-long (since World War II) sustained military apocalypse against civilians in five continents, against dozens of countries, hundreds of nations and peoples, slaughtering in the process many millions of innocent civilians — is precisely because in this state of “permanent war” it routinely attacks people who are not fighting against the US. US war constitutes terrorist war wherever the United States military attacks people who are unarmed, who are not fighting, and, again, who sometimes do not know there is a war.
A mutual state of war is reached when the Vietnamese People’s Army is formed by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap and the political leadership of the Vietnamese people, and they fight back. A mutual state of war is reached when the PAIGC is mobilized by Amilcar Cabral and the political representatives of the people of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, and this military organization fights back against the Portuguese occupation of their country, defeats this occupation force, and throws it out of their country. A state of war has been achieved when Winnie Mandela and the Spear of the Nation guerrilla organization respond to the violence of the apartheid regime with military force. A state of war has been reached when Hamas is formed as not merely a political organization representing the people of Occupied Palestine, but when it rises to the level of a military organization which can protect its people with arms, and fight back against the invading army.
Systematic murder The annihilation of unarmed African Americans by police departments throughout the United States is part of a system of terrorist war. When the snipers in Dallas fired on and shot down 12 police officers, in response to police murders of Black men in Minnesota and Louisiana, this is an act of war. This is not terrorist warfare, because police are combatants, they are part of a military machine. These snipers did not target random White people; they targeted an adjunct of the US military, the police — of Dallas. What makes this a non-terrorist act of war is that they were not retaliating against individual Dallas policemen who they adjudged had personally participated in the murder of anyone — though there undoubtedly are numerous instances of such. They responded to the generalized attack against us, specifically to those which took place in two separate parts of the country. This is what makes their response an act of war.
Proof that the United States government is waging war against African America are these figures released yesterday by the paramount political representative of the United States, Barak Obama:
African Americans are 30 percent more likely than whites to be pulled over. After being pulled over, African Americans and Hispanics are three times more likely to be searched. Last year, African Americans were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites. African Americans are arrested at twice the rate of whites. African American defendants are 75 percent more likely to be charged with offenses carrying mandatory minimums. They receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than comparable whites arrested for the same crime… [The] African American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population.
We are opposed to terrorism, and in our opposition we must remain clear that the principal perpetrator of terrorism world-wide and historically is the United States of America. We are opposed to the terrorism of the police departments in the United States, perpetrating the slaughter of unarmed, non-combatant African Americans at an increasingly genocidal rate. We must point out that despite the fairy tales served up to our children in “American History” classes all across the country for hundreds of years, Black folk did not sit idly while they were enslaved, tortured and murdered in this country. Black folk, accompanied by White and Native American allies, have always fought back. We must constantly remind oppressed people that it was a guerrilla band organized by John Brown and Harriet Tubman which forced the slave-ocracy to secede from the United States, thereby setting off the “Civil War.” The uprising represented by this guerrilla band at that time, also represents the uprising of those snipers in Dallas. To think that a people, any people, would merely lay down in front of unrelenting military violence against us is ludicrous and defies all historical evidence. Such a “hope” (on the part of our enemies) defies the logic of what it means to be human. No people in the history of the world has ever simply accepted annihilation. To claim such is the dream of the oppressors and perpetrators throughout human history.