Framing the contours of a debate goes a long way toward
winning it. Part of such framing involves efforts to make derogatory labels
stick to the opposing side. Through a number of decades in the twentieth
century, communist was the weapon of
choice. Actors who refused to name names found themselves blacklisted as
pro-communist, or having communist sympathies. A decade after the fall of the
U.S.S.R., labeling an organization or person as a terrorist came into its own
as the all-too-easy means of depriving an opposing side of credibility. By
2015, some people believed that anytime a person of a particular Middle-Eastern
religion kills someone, that person is a terrorist. The word’s very definition
was somehow pliable enough to accommodate prejudice and simple dislike. This is
not to say that real terrorists are squalid creatures; rather, my point is that
people had realized that they could score political points by applying the
label to their opponents and making it stick. Israel, for instance, had
successfully gotten the E.U. to label the Palestinian political party Hamas as
a terrorist organization. Yet as 2014 was coming to an end, the label was
becoming unstuck, with broader implications for the wider debate on Israel and
Palestine.
The full essay is at “E.U.
Shifts Debate.”