Freedom fighter or terrorist?
Sometimes it's better to report the facts and let your audience decide
The designation of Palestine Action and Antifa as terrorist organisations, and Donald Trump’s description of drug traffickers as narco-terrorists, has brought back to the headlines one of the most contentious words in the English language.
Palestine Action was founded in 2020 as a pro-Palestinian network that targets British involvement in Israeli weapons production. It was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government after its members sprayed paint on, and damaged, two RAF military aircraft at the Brize Norton airbase. More than 1,600 people have been arrested for supporting or protesting in favour of the group, which has focused on damaging property and has not carried out attacks on people.
In the United States, President Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa – short for anti-fascist – as a domestic terrorist organisation. He also justified the US military’s lethal strikes on suspected drug traffickers on boats in the Caribbean as a strike against “narco-terrorists”. But all three instances showed the problems for journalists following the lead of governments in using the term terrorist.
Palestine Action has never carried out attacks on people, and Antifa is not a formal organisation but a loosely affiliated movement. “Narco-terrorism” is not recognised internationally as a crime, and conflates organised crime with political violence. The Trump administration has used the term to justify extra judicial killings of suspected drug runners on boats in international waters.
Journalists often find themselves under pressure from authorities and other actors to use the word terrorist to describe militant groups who carry out indiscriminate acts of violence against civilians. The problem is that it is a subjective term that is loaded with moral, political, emotional and legal significance. It has often been used by governments to demonise political opponents, separatist groups, independence organisations and others. Some of these governments themselves had their roots in violent campaigns for independence or self-determination, and later became legitimate political entities in the eyes of the world and the United Nations.
Nelson Mandela founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the African National Congress, in 1961, and was sentenced to life in prison in 1964 for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the apartheid government. He spent 27 years behind bars before being released, and subsequently became South Africa’s first black president, a Nobel Peace laureate, and a venerated international statesman. But he was not always seen that way: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called the ANC “a typical terrorist organisation” in 1987, and Mandela remained on the US State Department’s terrorism watch list until 2008, five years after he left office as president. Mandela was close to Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and once said: “We identify with the PLO because just like ourselves they are fighting for the right of self-determination. Arafat is a comrade in arms, and we treat him as such.”
There is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism, but it is generally regarded as ideologically – usually politically – motivated violence by non-state actors against civilians.
The word terror was first used in a political context during the French revolution. Russian anarchists who carried out attacks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on members of the country’s ruling class called their actions “propaganda of the deed”, an early name for terrorism.
When Hamas invaded Israel on 7 October 2023, rampaging through communities and killing around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 250 hostages, the use of the word terrorist became a hot button issue in journalism.
Major media applied their long-standing guidance on its use to describe Hamas in the wake of the attacks, and faced criticism as a result. Here are some examples of these editorial guidelines:
The AP: “Instead of labeling an attack or attacker as terrorism or terrorist, AP describes the specific atrocity, massacre, bombing, or assassination, and so on. We do not use the terms terrorism or terrorist for specific actions or groups, other than when attributed to authorities or others” (from the AP Stylebook).
Reuters: “We may refer without attribution to terrorism and counter-terrorism in general but do not refer to specific events as terrorism. Nor do we use the adjective word terrorist without attribution to qualify specific individuals, groups or events”. (from the Reuters Handbook of Journalism).
The BBC: “we should not use the term ‘terrorist’ without attribution”.
In other words, only use it in quotes.
The veteran BBC correspondent John Simpson defended the public broadcaster’s rules on the use of terrorism in an opinion piece that attracted criticism from the British government and others.
“We regularly point out that the British and other governments have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation, but that’s their business. We also run interviews with guests and quote contributors who describe Hamas as terrorists”, he wrote. “The key point is that we don’t say it in our voice. Our business is to present our audiences with the facts, and let them make up their own minds”.
The British Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said the BBC’s policy “is verging on the disgraceful”.
“”They are not freedom fighters, they are not militants, they are pure and simple terrorists and it’s remarkable to go to the BBC website and still see them talking about gunmen and militants and not calling them terrorists”, he said.
The British government, the United States, the European Union and Israel are among the countries and institutions that have designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
The rules at my news agency AFP are similar to those of many other news organisations:
“AFP does not describe movements, organisations, guerrillas or armed groups as terrorists, even if they have taken part in the politically motivated killing of innocent civilians with the intent to create fear. However, if an organisation is designated by the United States, European Union, United Nations or another country or institution as terrorist we can say so with attribution”.
Shortly after the October 7 attack I was asked to write an article explaining AFP’s policy, which you can see below.
I made the point that this was not a new rule created for Hamas, but had been a long-standing policy. It applied to attacks on civilians that included bombings by the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland; the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States; the killing of African-Americans by a white supremacist in South Carolina in 2015; the Paris attacks of 2015; the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka in 2019; and the Christchurch mosque killings of the same year.
Likewise, AFP did not label as terrorists groups such as ETA, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the FARC, the Provisional IRA, Al-Qaeda, and the various groups that carried out attacks in Europe in the 20th century, including the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and Action Directe.
This is a rule that we have been steadfast in respecting, even when our own colleagues were murdered by groups designated as being terrorists by official bodies and governments.
This does not mean that as a journalist, you should hold back when describing the horror of attacks on innocent civilians, such as describing the bloody rampage carried out by Hamas in Israel. It is more effective to describe attackers in detail -- gunmen, suicide bombers, etc. -- and their actions and victims, rather than using emotive labels.
It is best to describe what happened and allow people to make up their own minds, just as when you fact-check a politician’s falsehoods. You don’t need to call the politician a liar, which is a subjective judgement, you can let the facts, or lack of them, speak for themselves.
I spoke about the AFP policy on the use of terrorist and terrorism at an AAJA-Asia conference in Singapore in 2024, and was challenged by an audience member who seemed incensed that we did not call Hamas terrorists.
I answered by telling a bit of family history. My grand uncle - my maternal grandmother’s brother - was a member of the original Irish Republican Army in Cork around 1920 as they fought for independence from Britain. My grandmother told me he slept with a gun under his pillow. For the British, the IRA’s violent campaign would have made them terrorists. For many in Ireland, they were freedom fighters who were instrumental in Ireland becoming an independent country.
At that point in the discussion I produced my Irish passport, which I obtained thanks to my grandmother. So what was my grand uncle?, I asked. A freedom fighter or a terrorist?