My latest for CounterPunch

“Power and Punishment in the Construct of Terrorism”

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday. If you have some time this weekend, please check out my latest article for CounterPunch magazine. Here’s a short excerpt:

To anyone paying even a little attention, this points dramatically to the way that the concepts or terror and terrorism are constructed in our language and culture. How we define and think about terrorism is fundamentally political, informed by our fears of ostracism and punishment. The delicately constructed notion of terrorism in currency in the West deliberately ignores questions of economic class, colonialism, and race, asking us to believe an account of reality that is at odds with all available evidence. In practice, proximity to social and political power stands in for objective criteria as the decisive factor in determining whether one is labeled a terrorist. In the United States, particularly in the hysterical environment of the post-9/11 War on Terror, terrorism has been the convenient, go-to pretext for violating the civil and human rights of political dissidents and activists.