“Terrorism” is just a label that means whatever the Western empire needs it to mean at a given time and place.
Terrorism financier Mohamed bin Salman, Donald Trump, and former Al-Qaeda in Syria chief Ahmed al-Sharaa. (White House/Wikimedia Commons)
The U.S. has removed Syria’s Al Qaeda franchise from its list of designated terrorist organizations just days after the U.K. added nonviolent activist group Palestine Action to its own list of banned terrorist groups.
The western empire will surely find ways to be even more hypocritical and ridiculous about its “terrorism” designations in the future, but at this point it’s hard to imagine how it will manage to do so.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Monday that the Trump administration is revoking the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that took power in Damascus in December 2024.
“HTS started as the al-Nusra Front, which was the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria until the group’s leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is now Syria’s de facto president, rebranded. In 2016, Sharaa, who was known at the time as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, announced he was disassociating from al-Qaeda, and thanked the ‘commanders of al-Qaeda for having understood the need to break ties.’
“Sharaa renamed his group HTS in 2017 and ruled Syria’s northwestern Idlib province until he led the offensive that ousted former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the end of last year. The U.S. has embraced the new Syrian leader despite his al-Qaeda past, which included fighting against U.S. troops in Iraq.”
This move comes as Sharaa holds friendly meetings with U.S. and U.K. officials and holds normalization talks with Israel, showing that all one has to do to cease being a “terrorist” in the eyes of the empire is to start aligning with the empire’s interests.
So that was on Monday. The Saturday prior, the group Palestine Action was added to the U.K.’s list of proscribed terrorist groups under the Terrorism Act of 2000, making involvement with the group as aggressively punishable as involvement with ISIS.
The “terrorism” in question? Spraying red paint on two British war planes in protest against the U.K.’s support for the Gaza holocaust. A minor act of vandalism gets placed in the same category as mass murdering civilians with a car bomb when the vandalism is directed at the imperial war machine in opposition to the empire’s genocidal atrocities.
Even expressions of support for Palestine Action are now illegal under British law, leading to numerous arrests over the weekend as activists expressed solidarity with the organization.
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, who is British, has been formally reported to U.K. counterterrorism police by U.K. Lawyers for Israel following the musician’s public statement saying, “I support Palestine Action. It’s a great organisation. They are non-violent. They are absolutely not terrorist in any way.”
So let’s recap.
Nonviolent protest against a genocide that’s being backed by the western empire: Terrorism. Banned. Nobody’s allowed to support this.
Being actual, literal Al Qaeda but aligning with the interests of the western empire: Not terrorism. Okie dokie. This is fine.
These hypocrisies and contradictions of the empire are worth drawing attention to because they clearly show that the empire does not stand where it claims to stand.
For decades we’ve been told that western military explosives are falling from the sky in the middle east and Africa because there are terrorists there who need to be stopped, but it turns out “terrorism” is just a meaningless label that means whatever the empire needs it to mean at a given time and place.
Iran’s IRGC is labeled a terrorist group because the Iranian military is not aligned with the U.S. empire. Israel’s IDF is not labeled a terrorist group despite its constant use of violence upon civilian populations in order to advance political goals.
Palestine Action is labeled a terrorist group because it opposes the empire’s genocidal atrocities. Al Qaeda in Syria is no longer a terrorist group because it’s making nice with Israel and doing what the empire wants.
“Terrorist” just means “anyone who inconveniences the empire in any way.” It really is that simple.
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This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
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The western superiority complex of warfare technology has been on a reign of terror for religious empires of dominance for close to 2000 years. Now even using their own mythology for crucifying countries and even pivotal regions of the world as well as defamation of character as a kind of human sacrifice death cult..
It is that simple.the USA and Britain have been the number one terrorist states for a very long time, the creation, support and activation of any terrorist branches is the making of these…so the war against terrorism inevitably mutates into war of terrorism, the war against drugs becomes the war of drugs, and yesterday’s terrorists become statesmen, all puppets on a string pulled by their masters whenever it suites the empire politics and financiers en vogue, sad, sick, and terribly depressing but the show must go on at all cost for a while at least..
When the United States Air Force dropped napalm and Agent Orange all over the Vietnamese jungles, the footage sure looked like a genuine form of terrorism to me.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is still a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy met with Ahmad al-Sharaa, Syria’s interim president and founder of Jabhat al-Nusra and HTS, just a few days ago, and numerous other UK politicians and media figures have been publicly fawning over him since Assad was ousted.
Clearly it’s not a question of legality, but purely of what imperialists like and don’t like.
they’ll probably claim that ‘meeting with’ and ‘fawning over’ is entirely different from ‘supporting’ (shakes head).
“but it turns out “terrorism” is just a meaningless label that means whatever the empire needs it to mean at a given time and place.”
Indeed, but this has always been the case. It’s just that the examples provided here and the actions of empire in general lately have made the point even more clearly than usual.
And all this simply highlights that the security narrative is just propaganda … this is always been and can only be about $$$ and power, a racket, as Smedley Butler said almost a hundred years ago. That the general population can continue to be triggered by this language management so easily makes the racket possible.