Terrorism: An Introduction and Refutation

Terrorism: An Introduction and Refutation of White's Urban Model With Contemporary Islamic Paradigms

According to the author Jonathon R. White, in his text, Terrorism: An Introduction (2002), the Latin American urban philosophy of terrorist urban cells, from the community, directed against the government and the community, dominated the concept of terrorism from about 1960 until the early 1990s. This urban model was a guerrilla model of fighting, called the 'tupamaros' structure by the author, wielded against civilians in an undeclared war against highly public and publicized targets, with fairly specific objectives. This methodology was popularized by the Cuban revolutionaries, and later extended throughout the world, although it retained its popularity in Latin America up to this day. (White, 2002, pp.118 & 121)

Of course, the urban still influences many terrorist groups such as violent right-wing North American extremists, as was evidenced in the Okalahoma City offices bombing, for which the terrorist Timothy McVey was executed. But as systematically organized as such modern terrorist efforts as those wielded against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, these latest Islamic terrorist efforts were somewhat different, and reflected a different model other than the urban model.

Firstly, the World Trade Center bombing was an act of violence lacking a cohesive structure, with a specific effort. Unlike the kidnappings that dotted the war torn nation of Lebanon, for instance, during the 1980s, this act had no specific objective. It was a random act of terrorism wielded against an ideology, that of the secular West, in the name of Islamic religious fundamentalism. It was the act of an an organization spread across nations, from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan in a way that was confusing to the West to understand or reconcile with previous community-located and objective-specific urban models. Rather than focusing attention on one event, attention was diffused throughout a variety of states of the American union, and upon both political and economic institutions.

Later, analysts 'read' this expression as the unity, in the terrorist's vision, not of a practical military objective but in a symbolic statement of hatred against the economic and political culture and dominance of America and the West. Before "individual murders" were used to terrorize "Westerners" and their "lackeys" into submission. (White, 2002, p.114) These individuals were not "inflamed" with a specific revolutionary passion, a la Che Guevara, but possessed of a more diffuse anger, with a nostalgic gaze upon the past, paradise like structure of Islamic unreality. But unlike the 'tupamaros' the fear such terrorism instigates in people is not the fear of walking the street everyday. These new factors influence the urban model by making fear both more diffuse, and also more concentrated not upon every day events, but on travel and upon respected institutions.