The term terrorism flattened diverse political violence into one undifferentiated category

Evidence

Such simplifications are not limited to describing actual people but extend to framing their actions. During the War on Terror, the government and media have used the term terrorism as a catchall for the endlessly complex realm of political violence; such terminology has in turn shaped the public discourse in at least three key ways. First, it tends to conflate all violence perpetrated by Arabs and Muslims as “terrorism” regardless of historical context or political grievance; such explanations are often depoliticized, dehistoricized, and decontextualized. The term terrorism has been used to describe an array of politically motivated violent acts, from anticolonial rebellion to Arab nationalists, from Palestinians’ suicide bombings opposing Israeli occupation to the peaceful opposition of political Islamists to U.S. involvement in the Middle East. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 833

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key mechanism of the book: ‘terrorism’ as a catchall term whose use depoliticizes, dehistoricizes, and decontextualizes all Arab/Muslim violence.
• XREF: Connects to my existing knowledge base on moral panics, one-shot games, and how category labels shape institutional response — the same dynamic as labeling in the law-merchant and noise literature. — connects to: The terrorism category flexibly expands to include non-Muslim countries like North Korea; The political meaning of terror originally applied to governments, not only nonstate actors — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 880