Remi Brulin: Yes, thanks for having me, Glenn.

GG: Let me just begin by asking you to summarize what the focal point of your research has been; you’ve been researching this topic for several years now. What has been the scope of your research, what kinds of things have you been looking at, and what is the general scope of what you’re writing about?

RB: As you said, I’ve been researching this for a while now, about eight years, and what I’m looking at specifically is the American political discourse on terrorism, basically since ’45 but what I show is that the discourse, the term ‘terrorism’ started being used in the discourse only in ’81, beginning with the Reagan years. What I also look at is how the media, particularly in the case of my dissertation The New York Times, has used the term over the years.

And the big question, of course, is the question of the definition of terrorism, meaning who do we call terrorists, and who do we not call terrorists, and whether there is questions of double standards and everything. And this is relevant because at the international level, there is no agreed-upon definition of terrorism, and at the US level, meaning for example the Executive Branch, there also is no one single definition of terrorism, and yet the term is used over and over again in our political discourse, and as you’ve shown in many of your articles, it has consequences, very serious consequences.

GG: If you go back to – and the title of your dissertation indicates that your beginning year that you’re looking at is 1945 – over the next several decades after World War II, you can find generalized instances of presidents declaring whoever happened to be the enemy of the day to be terrorists, in kind of like a name-calling, demonizing way.

But when did the term really start to take on international prominence, meaning when did we start struggling to come up with definitions of the term as though there was some kind of hardened scientific meaning that we could ascribe to it?

RB: There was one first attempt at getting to an international definition of terrorism when the League of Nations produced a convention in order to fight terrorism in ’37, but it failed. Then after that, basically the term is not used in the US political discourse at all, until the ’70s, more or less. The president, we know that today because it is very easy to research, because we have access to the papers of the president and they’re digitized and we can use search engines; we could not do that ten years ago. So we know for a fact that presidents until Carter never really used the term terrorism, and Carter used it mostly in ’79 and 1980, and it was in reference to the hostage crisis in Iran.

Even then, even when Carter used it, and he used it in, I don’t know, 120 speeches or so, even he was not using the term terrorism as a discourse, meaning that the term was used once or twice to refer specifically to that one act of terrorism, namely the hostage crisis. But he did not turn this into a discourse. The term terrorism is not suddenly supposed to explain everything, to tell us who the enemy was, and did not draw a line between those who were the terrorists and those who were not. It was just about that one incident. So there was no discourse. The real discourse appears with Reagan administration in 1981.

In my research, I tried to determine where it’s coming from, and I found that there are possibly two origins, two explanations for where the discourse comes from. One is from Latin America, and the other is from Israel.

GG: With regard to Latin America, as you just said, that began in 1981 with the Reagan administration, the various wars that it waged there in terms of who was a terrorist, who wasn’t, were we funding the terrorists, like with the Contras, who were trying to overthrow the government, or were we fighting against terrorists, and those terms got confused. But when you say that one potential origin was Israel, talk about how Israel began using the term and what relevance that has to the international activity in attempts to come up with an international definition.

RB: Israel started using the term to explain or to characterize its struggle, its conflicts with Palestinians and with the Arab states in general, since early on, in the ’60s and ’70s. In fact, if you study the debates at the UN, which is something I looked at, you can see that there’s a very different way of talking about terrorism on the Israeli side, and on the American side, throughout the ’70s, all the way up until the ’80s. For Israel, right away, in the ’70s, in the early ’70s, there is a war against terrorism. The Arab states are terrorist states, and they are at war with Israel. There are parallels with the threat of terrorism and the threat posed by the Nazis. Those are terms that are used over and over and over again by the Israeli representatives at the UN General Assembly and at the UN Security Council in the ’70s. And Israel was the only state to say that about terrorism.

But that changed in the ’80s, and one thing I looked at is, there were a couple of conferences, one in ’79 and one in ’84, that were both organized by an organization, an institute, called the Jonathan Institute. It’s called the Jonathan Institute after the name of Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Jonathan Netanyahu, and he was killed in the raid in Entebbe in ’76. Basically, this conference was organized in ’79, and I can read to you what the official objective was.

GG: So in other words, basically the first conference that was designed to define or come up with a consensus definition of terrorism, was already cast in Middle East terms because the conference was named after Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, who had tried to rescue the hostages from Uganda?

RB: Absolutely.

GG: And… go ahead.

RB: The objective, the official objective is – I have the transcripts of the conference – it says that the objective is “to focus public attention on the real nature of international terrorism, on the threat that it poses to all democratic societies, and on the measures necessary for defeating the forces of terror.” And everything in the book is about the fact that terrorism is not something that, is not a threat that Israel only is facing, but it’s a threat to all democracies, the whole Western world.

Then there’s this idea that terrorism and totalitarianism, meaning the Soviet Union and its allies, are linked, that the terrorists are also the totalitarians. And then there is the focus on state support or state sponsoring of international terrorism, which are issues that were absolutely not in the American discourse on terrorism until then, but at the conference, you look at the list of the people invited, and you have George Bush, the father of W. Bush, who was the ambassador, the American ambassador at the UN in the ’70s.

You have Jack Kemp, Republican from New York. You have George Will, you have Norman Podhoretz, you have Henry Jackson, famous senator, you have Richard Pipes, a right-wing ideologue. You have Menachem Begin who is there, you have Shimon Peres, you have Netanyahu, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu who is now prime minister, and so you have a clear link between the American discourse, suddenly, and the Israeli discourse, and from that moment on, in America, people are going to be starting to talk about terrorism in ways similar to how Israel had been talking about it for 10 or 15 years.

GG: In light of that objective, to sort of internationalize the idea of terrorism from what it had been, which was a way of talking about Israel’s various enemies, into this concept that the whole Western democratic world ought to recognize as a universal problem, was there an actual definition agreed upon between the members of that conference?

RB: Well, yes. Actually, it’s interesting, because they did come up with a definition which is more or less similar to one that you mentioned earlier in one of your pieces, meaning the one from the State Department, and it’s a very basic definition – I’m trying to find it here, yeah, it’s right here – “terrorism is the deliberate systematic murder, maiming and menacing of innocents to inspire fear in order to gain political ends.” So there is nothing that is controversial about that definition; it is very broad. It is nonspecific.

But what is interesting is when you look at the presentations, the speeches during the conference, you have one of the issues of the definition of terrorism is whether there is a difference between terrorism and struggles for national determination, or whether there is a difference between terrorism and freedom fighters. And you have an article here, a speech given on the issue of freedom fighters versus terrorists by Menachem Begin, and of course Menachem Begin was a member of the Irgun, which was according to the British in the ’40s, a terrorist organization.

GG: What did it do? What kind of things did it do that warranted that label in the eyes of the British?

RB: They are famous – and that aspect is interesting in itself – they are famous mostly because of the bombing of the King David Hotel in the ’40s, and basically it was where the British forces were headquartered. They put a huge bomb in the basement, and there happened to be many many civilians in the building, the building collapsed, and this was front page news around the world. The New York Times called that an act of terrorism at the time. The British called that an act of terrorism. And in fact Begin mentions that incident in his speech, and he says that in fact the Irgun had called in advance, it wasn’t really an act of terrorism, but he said that in any case this is a unique case and then says that the method of the Irgun was “to never hurt a civilian or a man, woman or child whether Jew, Arab or British.”

So he is very clear as what would be terrorism. The problem is that of course historically, it is absolutely not true that the Irgun “never killed a single civilian, Arab, Jew or British.” There were literally dozens of cases of bombs being put in marketplaces, in theaters, in Palestinian quarters throughout the ’30s and then in the ’40s, and those clearly were acts of terrorism. The way they deal with this during this conference with the definition is basically by not mentioning those acts that would actually qualify under their own definition of terrorism as acts of terrorism. So that way Begin can say that the Irgun were freedom fighters and not terrorists, by simply ignoring the historical record.

GG: As you indicated a little bit earlier, the use of the word terrorism within American political discourse really began to intensify in the 1980s, and not necessarily in connection with a lot of the attacks from Middle Easterners, which we think of as terrorism today, but really with regard to what we were doing in Central America.

Talk about that development, and also related to it, the question of whether or not these definitions of terrorism allow for states, for actual governments, to engage in terrorism, or whether it has to be nongovernment actors.

RB: Yes, that’s the other big question when it comes to the definition of terrorism. As I mentioned earlier, the first question is whether there is a difference between a struggle for national liberation and terrorism, and the other question is whether states can be engaging in terrorism, whether the concept of state terrorism exists or not.

In ’81, we had indeed the birth of a discourse on terrorism in the US political discourse, and it focuses nearly completely on Latin America and Central America. Reagan when he talks about terrorism in the ’80s, very very rarely mentions the Middle East, even rarely mentions Khaddafi, which is surprising to most people probably. He mentions all the time the situation in El Salvador and in Nicaragua, and when he is talking about Nicaragua and El Salvador, he is basically saying that military aid to El Salvador is justified because they’re fighting the terrorists, meaning the FMLN in El Salvador, and aid to the Contras is also justified because they’re fighting against the Sandinistas, and the Sandinistas are a state sponsoring terrorism.

This is where the question of whether a state can be involved in terrorism comes into play. It is obvious in the American political discourse, in the presidential discourse in the ’80s, that a state can be involved indirectly, meaning as a sponsor of terrorism. During the ’80s you have very harsh debates in Congress between Republicans and Democrats, because they completely disagree on who are the terrorists. The Democrats throughout the ’80s say over and over again that the Contras are terrorists, and they state specifically that they are terrorist because of the methods that they use, and they quote many, many studies by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch and others, and they said the same thing about El Salvador. In El Salvador the Democrats say that because of the methods that they use, the death squads in El Salvador are guilty of terrorism, and because of the links between the death squads and the government of El Salvador, the government is also guilty of state terrorism, and therefore the US should not be sending military aid to the government.

GG: In fact, if that argument were true, and it’s hard to dispute it if you settle on a clear definition of terrorism, but if it’s true that the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador were themselves terrorist organization, then it would necessarily follow, wouldn’t it, that the United States, which was funding and supporting those organizations, was itself a state sponsor of terrorism?

RB: Absolutely, and in fact the Democrats, many, many Democrats in the ’80s say that, in the House and in the Senate, they say specifically that if we give aid and support to the Contras or military aid to El Salvador, this will go to the commission of terrorist acts, we know it, and therefore the US will be involved in state sponsoring of terrorism. For that one reason you have an amendment that was proposed by Senator Dodd, Chris Dodd, in ’84, and he proposed it twice, in April and then in October of ’84, and basically the Senate had just voted in favor of military aid to the Contras, he had voted against, and after having been defeated, he said, well, maybe what we could do at least is add a little amendment saying that no funds that we just voted for, no funds should go to the commission of acts of terrorism. Very clear, simple,…

GG: It was basically an amendment providing that the United States shall be banned from funding terrorist groups?

RB: Funding terrorism and terrorist acts, literally and explicitly that.

GG: What was the vote on that amendment?

RB: The vote was, in both cases, in April and October, every single Democrat senator voted in favor of this, and every single Republican voted against it. So they had a very slight majority, and so the amendment was never passed. What’s interesting here, aside from the debates, which were fantastic, which were fascinating, because they had to deal with the definition of terrorism, and Dodd did actually what you did in one of your pieces, where he used one specific definition of terrorism, and then you applied it to specific cases.

That’s what Dodd did: he said, I’m using here the definition of the State Department, and according to the State Department’s definition, what the Contras do is undoubtedly terrorism. So we should put an end to that. And the Republicans, the very few who actually agreed to take part in the debate – Specter did, Stevens did – their arguments were just striking, and basically they were that the Contras were freedom fighters, they were not terrorists, and that the US could not vote for an amendment like this because doing so would be admitting that the US had been involved in state sponsoring of terrorism, and that’s just not something that the US does.