Terrorist or Disturbed Loner? The Contentious Politics of a Label

When a 48-year-old man rammed a van into a crowd near a London mosque on Monday morning, controversy quickly erupted over whether the attack would be treated as less significant than others because it was committed against Muslims but not by them.

Such debates have typically played out over whether anti-Muslim violence is labeled terrorism. Though Monday’s attack appears to fit scholarly and legal definitions for terrorism, past incidents have been called hate crimes or attributed to disturbed loners with far-right leanings but no real agenda.

Prime Minister Theresa May called the attack terrorism. But debate has continued, suggesting it is about more than labels, but a suspicion that society grants greater importance to non-Muslim than Muslim victims and to Islamist than far-right or other threats.
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These debates have raged since 2015, when the rise of attacks by the Islamic State coincided with an uptick in violence against Muslims in the United States and Europe.

The question of how to talk about and treat those two forms of violence overlaps with sensitive issues related to the integration of Muslim communities into Western societies.

As attacks against Muslims have risen, many have been labeled something other than terrorism. For Muslim victims, this seemed to confirm suspicions that society sees them as potential threats more readily than as fellow citizens to be protected.

Civil rights groups say the hesitation in labeling anti-Muslim violence as terrorism is part of the same anti-Muslim bias that manifests in, for example, policing and hiring discrimination.

But other factors play a role as well. Formal definitions of terrorism typically rest on motive, which can be tricky to determine, particularly in the immediate moments after an attack.

According to British law, an attack is deemed terrorism when it seeks “to influence the government” or “intimidate the public” with the aim of “advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.”

Louise Richardson, an Irish political scientist, has posed a similar definition: “Terrorism simply means deliberately and violently targeting civilians for political purposes.”

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