Tuesday December 11, 2012
Words at war
By FADZILAH AMIN
Beware: The terms used to describe conflicts are often spun to subtly support one side or the other. So read them carefully.
IT HAS been said that in some kinds of armed conflict, one side’s resistance fighter is the other side’s terrorist. Words or phrases used in speaking about warfare of all kinds can be emotional in that they reveal what the speaker feels and where his sympathies lie.
They can also be deliberately emotive in trying to arouse other people’s feelings and gain their support for the speaker’s cause. Other emotive and emotional terms that are widely used now are the resistance or resistance movement when it is a movement that you support or approve of, and terror(ist) organisation when it is your enemy’s organisation or one that you dislike.
There is also the term state terrorism when a country’s military forces attack a group you sympathise with. That country may claim to be just defending itself or attacking your group or territory as deterrence.
This use of English is seen clearly in the reporting of the recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas. Let me compare how the killing of Hamas military chief Ahmed al-Jabari, a key event in this round of hostilities, is described on two different websites.
Martyr vs terrorist
Isi Leibler, in an article called “Only disproportionate deterrence will offset Hamas” in the Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post of 18 November, wrote:
“It must be stressed that the targeted killings of terrorist leaders are not acts of revenge or showmanship. They are logical military actions which can be rationally justified in moral terms. The killing of Ahmad Jabari, regarded as the Palestinian counterpart of Osama bin Laden, is a prime example. Unlike US drone attacks on al-Qaida and the Taliban, the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] succeeded in avoiding collateral casualties.”
In contrast, the following contains part of the statement made by Hamas about the killing, quoted on The Palestinian Information Center website (palestine-info.co.uk/en):
“The statement said Jabari was a senior Hamas operative ... directly responsible for executing resistance operation against the [Israeli] occupation in the past number of years’ and that the Hamas movement ‘mourns the martyr leader Ahmed al-Jabari, and his bodyguard the martyr Mohammed al-Hams, and holds the Israeli occupation fully responsible for this heinous crime, and stresses that it will pay a heavy price by targeting resistance leaders and symbols of our people’ ...”
Leibler’s article refers to Al-Jabari as a terrorist leader and even compares him to Osama bin Laden (an outrageous comparison in my opinion), while the Hamas statement refers to him as a martyr leader responsible for resistance operations against Israeli occupation of Palestine. Also, while Leibler defends the killing as moral, Hamas regards it as a heinous crime. Surely these two views of Al-Jabari and his killing are polar opposites of each other. There is a range of other views in other news websites, but there is no space to discuss them here.
Two terms that Leibler used – targeted killings and collateral casualties – are of further interest in the wider context of euphemisms used in recent wars.
Ian Shaw, a research fellow in Glasgow University, wrote in a blog on Nov 25 about the term targeted killing. He said that it was in the second Palestinian intifada of 2000 “that Israel used this provocative vocabulary to replace the more emotionally-charged ‘assassination’ or ‘liquidation’.” To me, this term focuses on the clinical precision of the killing, rather than its human cost.
Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist who is against Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, mentioned another term for this in an article in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, on Nov 18. He wrote: “The IDF fires a new term into the battleground, “beheading,” to describe what Israel was doing to the Hamas military leadership.” This term describes the tactic of killing a leader in order to weaken his group, although the gory metaphor of beheading makes it less of a euphemism.
Belittling lives
The term collateral casualties used by Leibler is a variation of the more usual war term, collateral damage. This is a military euphemism for “people who are killed or property that is damaged accidentally in a war” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). The term collateral casualties only refers to people, not property. Whichever term is used, it does seem to make light of the lives lost and injuries suffered when civilians become accidental victims of war.
However, this term does not sound as callous as the term friendly fire, a term often used by military spokesmen to mean “weapon fire coming from one’s own side that causes accidental injury or death to one’s own forces” (COD).
How can weapon fire ever be friendly, one may ask? It is one of the most harrowing ironies of war when a soldier or soldiers are killed in this way.
I remember reading about Pat Tillman, a former professional American football player, who left his safe and lucrative job in 2002 to join the army “after he expressed deep patriotism in the wake of” the 9-11 attacks (Washington Post, May 30, 2004).
On April 22, 2004, he was reported to have been killed in Afghanistan “by enemy fire in a heroic rescue attempt” and was promptly awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart for “combat valor”.
More than a month after his death, it was revealed that he had actually died from friendly fire “by members of his elite Army Ranger platoon who mistakenly shot in his direction when the unit was ambushed.” What bitter irony it must have been for his family and friends!
Another military term for friendly fire is a blue-on-blue incident, “from the use of blue to indicate friendly forces in military exercises” (COD). The term green on blue has also been used recently “to describe attacks on NATO forces by members of the Afghan security forces”.
However, I could not find a dictionary that explains the significance of the colours in that term. The web page from which I got the definition above states that it is a new term suggested for inclusion in the dictionary by someone, but has yet to be approved “pending investigation” (collinsdictionary.com/submission/46/green%20on%20blue).
I can only guess that “blue” stands for NATO, because of the colour of its flag, but the significance of “green” evades me. The current Afghan flag is only partly green, and the uniforms of both NATO and Afghan soldiers are in shades of green and brown. I do hope that “green”, a colour associated with Islam, does not refer to that religion, for that would make the term a very unfriendly one indeed to the hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world.
■ Fadzilah Amin taught English literature at university, but after retirement started teaching English language. Mind Our English is published once a week on Tuesdays. For comments or inquiries on English usage, please contact the writer at fedela7@yahoo.co.uk
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