Racializing the terrorist threat: why we should be a little more suspicious of how well this is working

By Laura Bohnert
On February 13, 2015, a mass shooting plot that was planned for February 14 at an undisclosed public location in Halifax was foiled by Halifax police. The event, as official reports disclose, has not been linked to terrorism.
“I wouldn’t characterize it as a terrorist event,” reports Nova Scotia RCMP Commanding Officer Brian Brennan. “I would classify it as a group of individuals that had some beliefs and were willing to carry out violent acts against citizens.”
The group of individuals consists of four members, three of whom were taken into police custody. The fourth member, a 19-year-old man, was found dead in a Timberlea home. An investigation into the cause of his death is still underway. The three suspects who are now in custody consist of a 20-year-old man and a 23-year-old woman from Illinois, both of whom were arrested at the Halifax International airport, and a 17-year-old man who was arrested in Cole Harbour.
The plot, which was foiled by police as a result of a public tip, involved a plan to open fire on a mass number of citizens before the suspects would turn fire on themselves.
This corresponds to the alarmingly high murder rate that has affected Alberta this past year. There was the house-party shooting in Southwest Calgary that claimed one life and left six others wounded, an event that followed mere days after Phu Lam gunned down eight people, seven of whom were family members, before killing himself. On April 15, five students were stabbed to death in Calgary; and on June 4, three RCMP officers in Moncton were gunned down. And, it is difficult not to consider all of this in light of the murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo in Ottawa; the recent shooting of Constable David Matthew Wynn and Constable Derek Bond, the former of whom was killed, in St. Albert; and the slaying of the two police officers in New York.
Of all of these instances of violence, attempted or otherwise, what is it that makes them distinct from terrorist acts?
Terrorism is generally defined, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as the use of violence intended to instill fear or terror. More specifically, the OED defines terrorism politically, as “the unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims… in order to maintain [governmental] control over a population.” This definition, however, can also be broadened to include not just political aims, but religious and ideological ambitions, as well.
Based on this definition, how can we eliminate any form of public or mass murder from the terrorism category? Some of the listed incidents, of course, point to a psychological break, but many were intended to incite fear. Many were attacking points of power, authority, and security in an act that could only incite fear in exposing the vulnerability of our nation’s line of defence — targeting our military and our RCMP. More specifically, how does Brennan’s description of the intentions of the ring of individuals planning the Halifax attack not directly depict terrorism?
A group of individuals planning to target a mass number of citizens due to “some beliefs” — the only thing missing from the equation is race.
Of all the incidents, the slaying of Nathan Cirillo was the event that was most readily promoted as terrorism. Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the man who is responsible for Cirillo’s death, was also Muslim.
This poses the question: has terrorism been racialized? Of course it has. It has not only been racialized, but has become the means of weaponizing racism.
We should be asking ourselves why the Cirillo incident was so easily promoted as terrorism when another event that fits the terrorism definition was disclosed as non-terrorist before its investigation has even been completed. The answer is simple: defining Cirillo’s death as the result of terrorism could fuel the political purpose where the Halifax incident cannot.
Let’s not forget Harper’s war campaign; having the nation poised against the “Muslim threat,” fueling anti-Middle-Eastern racism, is a means of garnering our consent in the war effort. The dangerous terrorist threat needs to be discernibly other — it needs to be foreign, but it also needs to describe our foreign political opponents — it cannot come from within our own [in this case, significantly white] borders, or else terrorism fails in its intent to unify our nation against the threat we have been allowed and conditioned to fear.