Ivelaw L. Griffith

The horrendous 9-11 episodes of violence in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania have resulted in the word “terrorism” becoming etched indelibly in the memories of millions of Americans and other nationals around the world. However, media portrayal during those episodes and following them often has adopted such a reductionist approach to terrorism—zeroing in on Islam, Afghanistan, and the Middle East—that the multidimensionality and diversity involved often become lost in the discourse or sacrificed for media sound bite simplicity.

Yet, terrorism, both before and after 9-11, has been a complex phenomenon, characterized by diversity in a variety of ways. Terrorism itself is violence or threatened violence to sow panic in society, to weaken or overthrow a government and bring about political change. It is violence for effect—and sometimes not at all for effect on the victims of the violent action. Indeed, the victims may be totally unrelated to cause of the terrorists.

This much was clear from the 9-11 incidents, which also dramatized some of the diversity involved in terrorism. The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash in Pennsylvania all occurred in the territory of the United States, but the victims were not only Americans. Given the prodigiousness of their intelligence and planning, the perpetrators had to have known that the planes used as missiles would have nationals from countries other than the United States. Moreover, they surely knew of the international and other diversity of the occupants and visitors of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But to them all that was beside the point.

Thus, just in relation to victims there was an international—and transnational—dimension. Indeed, nationals and citizens of 85 different countries from every continent were involved. When one considers the racial, gender, linguistic, religious, and other elements of those thousands of victims from the 85 countries, the diversity implications assume frightening proportions. The lives of those leaders and future leaders of industry, government, education, business, international affairs, and other occupational arenas and the consequences for the countless families and friends affected meant nothing to the perpetrators; they saw them simply in collateral terms, in the larger scheme of things where violence for effect is a guiding philosophy.

Nevertheless, the diversity involved in terrorism goes beyond the transnationality of the victims and the countries from which they came as well as the diversity of each of the countries involved. There in diversity is relation to the perpetrators. For many people in the United States, terrorism ceased to be a foreign phenomenon with the bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993, which killed six people and injured over 1,000, and of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, which killed 168 people and injured hundreds. These incidents led to the realization by many citizens that terrorists are not always foreigners or Muslim; and they do not all live in the Middle East or any single part of the world.

In the case of the 9-11 incidents, the terrorists and their known collaborators come from 35 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Indeed, although Afghanistan is the target of United States military response, not all the operatives and their sympathizers there are Afghani; they come from different parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, with differing cultural and racial conditions, although most of them embrace Islam or repudiate Judaism. One was even from the United States. Moreover, the nearly 250 detainees at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba are from 25 countries around the world.

Thus, the complexity of terrorism in general and the 9-11 incidents in particular suggests that coming to terms with questions of Who? What? Why? Where? require an appreciation that terrorism is a multidimensional phenomenon, with diversity among the terrorists themselves, the victims, and the religious and political fulcrums around which their actions are centered.