Terrorism is a political act, not a religious one

Evidence

The recodification of racism in North America whereby the Jew became the Muslim and the black the brown (or Arab, in a color-coded register) was predicated on a fundamental logical flaw, whereby the criminal acts of a band of militant Muslim adventurers was politicized, identified as definitive to a world religion, and called “Islamic terrorism”. Islam is a world religion; terrorism is a political act, indiscriminately targeting civilian populations—examples of which in modern history include the Irgun in Palestine, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Janjaweed in Darfur. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 616

Categorization

• SHARE: The Irgun/Khmer Rouge/Janjaweed list of non-Muslim terror movements is a tight rhetorical counter for exactly one interlocutor who thinks ‘Islamic terrorism’ is self-evident.
• XREF: connects to: Terrorism labeling follows political allegiance, not acts of violence — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 413; The terrorism label is a trans-ideological tool for suppressing dissent, not Muslim-specific — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 643

Related

• Terrorism is a political act divorced from any religion’s essence (similarity 0.94)
• Terrorism is labeled by religion only when the perpetrators are Muslim. (similarity 0.86)
• Terrorism labeling follows political allegiance, not acts of violence (similarity 0.84)
• The term terrorism flattened diverse political violence into one undifferentiated category (similarity 0.83)
• Western states reframed non-state political violence as psychopathology to strip it of legitimacy (similarity 0.83)
• The War on Terror fused the concepts of Muslim and terrorist. (similarity 0.82)
• The global war on terrorism rhetorically morphed into a war on Islam and Muslims (similarity 0.82)
• Practicing Islam functionally replaced Communism as the most threatening subversive activity (similarity 0.82)
• The War on Terror globally embedded a racialized terrorist stereotype of Muslims (similarity 0.82)
• The War on Terror unites disparate national crusades against a single depersonalized Arab object (similarity 0.81)
• Terrorism is not uniquely Islamic but often stems from state negligence and empire. (similarity 0.81)
• Racialized Muslim labels enable state social control over civil liberties (similarity 0.81)
• Counter-radicalization conflates perpetrators’ religion with causes of terrorism. (similarity 0.81)
• The War on Terror trained people to see extremism as exclusive to Islam (similarity 0.81)
• Radicalization theory reduces all Muslims to presumptive terrorists (similarity 0.80)