“Terrorist Organization” Means Whatever The US Wants It To Mean

The US government is simultaneously (A) justifying Israel’s land grab in Syria by saying the nation has been taken over by terrorists, and (B) talking about removing those same forces from its list of designated terrorist organizations.

The US podium people have pivoted seamlessly from celebrating the liberation of the Syrian people in the removal of Assad to citing the fact that the nation is now overrun with terrorist factions in defense of Israel’s rapid move to militarily occupy large swathes of Syrian land while hammering Syria with hundreds of airstrikes.

At a Monday press conference, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said these moves by Israel “are temporary to defend its borders” and that Assad’s ouster “potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations that would threaten the state of Israel and would threaten civilians inside Israel.”

“Every country has the right to take action against terrorist organizations,” Miller added.

During a Tuesday press conference Miller further clarified the US position on Israel’s land grab, saying, “What precipitated their move into the buffer zone was the withdrawal of the Syrian armed forces, which, as I said yesterday, creates potentially a vacuum that could be filled by any one of the numerous terrorist organizations that continue to operate inside Syria that have sworn to the destruction of the state of Israel.”

During the same Tuesday press conference Miller also stated that “there is no legal barrier to us speaking to a designated terrorist group” such as HTS, the group which led the run on Damascus whose leader has been an official in both ISIS and al-Qaeda.

And as it happens the US government has now taken a sudden interest in removing HTS from its listing as a designated terrorist organization, with Politico reporting that there is now “a furious debate playing out in Washington” as to whether or not the group should be removed from the list immediately. Somehow I doubt the debate is actually all that “furious”.

So according to one narrative Syria has been liberated by brave freedom fighters and that’s wonderful, but according to another concurrent narrative Israel obviously needs to invade Syria because the nation has just been taken over by evil terrorists, and by yet another concurrent narrative those evil terrorists aren’t evil terrorists anymore because they’re going to be running a US puppet regime.

These are the kinds of contradictions you run into when your policies are guided by the blind pursuit of planetary domination instead of by truth and morality.

In reality, “terrorist organization” is a political designation, not a behavioral one. It has a lot less to do with how an organization acts and operates and a lot more to do with whether or not they advance the strategic interests of the US empire.

Pick any group of non-state actors who fight against the US and its allies and you’ll find them on the US government’s list of terrorist organizations. Hamas. Hezbollah. They’ll even put official state militaries on there like Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They used to list the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as a terrorist faction back when the US was expanding its global military presence under the banner of the “war on terror”, but they were removed from this listing at the tail end of the Trump administration because the Uyghur Islamist group has been fighting Assad in Syria and may prove useful in the empire’s cold war aggressions against China.

Even now the US House of Representatives is moving to ban the US government from using the statistics of Gaza’s health ministry to calculate deaths from Israel’s genocidal atrocities in the enclave on the basis that the health ministry is run by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. They need to do this because the Gaza health ministry’s death toll is considered so reliable that the US State Department has been using those stats in their own reports.

The group that is committing the genocide necessitating such analysis is of course not a designated terrorist organization.

This is because the label “terrorist organization” is nothing more than a tool of imperial narrative control. In empire language it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”. If they are determined to no longer be disobedient then they no longer need bombs dropped on them, so they are no longer considered terrorists.

You can kill all the civilians you want using whatever methods you want without being considered a terrorist organization, so long as you are a friend of the US empire.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/terrorist-organization-means-whatever