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I'd rather if the word "terrorism" and "terrorist" are retired as categories and a new terminology formed. For years as a Palestinian Muslim I had to swallow the bitter pill of using terminology that was originally explicitly created in order to criminalize people like me.
But for decades since the "War on Terror" there was no appetite to questioning the terminology. Now it's a few decades later and the appetite that didn't exist then seems to exist now. It's time to reopen the conversation about the terminology used in the entire CVE field.
Yes, I am calling for the decolonization of the CVE field and for questioning its terminology, its concepts, its epistemology, its methodologies, all of it. Let's not kid ourselves as to the origins. Do we need CVE? Absolutely. Does it have racist origins? Absolutely.
I've spoken a lot about radicalization - but in every conversation about terminology I've said that "radicalization/radicalized" are terrible terms that we had to use for the lack of power to change them. And had we come with our own terms we'd have made ourselves irrelevant.
The "terrorism" thing was invented as a category in order to criminalize certain groups and as a wholesale pretext to treat them as a permanent security threat to the "civilized" folks. One of the earliest advocates of this was none other than Netanyahu. https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi/status/1341815237952086016
When I speak about double standards I am not saying I want white people to be treated like we've been treated. I'm saying: Treat us like you treat white people as a group - as full humans, who sometimes can get... "radicalized", without the group itself being criminalized.
Repeating once more: The US doctrine on terrorism was taken from Israeli doctrine. This is the origin of this field as a category. https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi/status/1341815239915032581
How Israel was using "terrorist" in... the 1980s https://twitter.com/pluckyunderdog/status/1347501052124418048
By 1982 the Israeli state was not only using it, it was using it so cynically that it was getting caricatured for it
What "fighting terrorism" looks like irl. I repeat, the entire category was created in order to make this acceptable and routine. Now that we have the power to question this, let's aim for more humanity, not less. https://twitter.com/Barahmeh/status/1190860314490875904
