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Whose Violence Counts as Terrorism?

Outrage over the CBC’s description of 9/11 obscures the selective way Western governments and media define political violence

Morgan Duchesney - September 11, 2026: Canadian Dimension

Mainstream pundits’ outrage over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s recent description of 9/11 as something other than a terror attack may be due to their ideological perspective.

Conversely, these same commentators consistently support Canada’s terrorist designation for resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah without reference to the fact that Israel’s conduct conforms to the term’s legal definition.
Terrorism’s ideological or popular definition differs sharply from that of the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police). This ideological definition interprets terrorism as violent resistance to the conduct of the United States and allies like Canada and Israel.

According to the RCMP:
It [terrorism] is….an act or omission committed… for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause…With the intention of intimidating the public or segment thereof…… to cause serious violence to persons, property, critical infrastructure, or essential systems.

Canada’s legal definition of terrorism perfectly describes the high-tech violence of the United States and its Israeli client, particularly Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine that features the use of “… massive, disproportionate force and the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure.”

The words used to describe 9/11 matter less than the consequences of that atrocity. Twenty-six years later, the official explanation for the attacks remains implausible and Osama bin Laden is unavailable for comment. The hijackers were criminals who ought to have been pursued by international law enforcement agencies rather than the military.

Immediately after the attacks, governments in China, Russia, Israel and elsewhere used 9/11 as a handy excuse to intensify their persecution of resistance groups by falsely linking them to Al Qaeda. This oppression continues unabated and is largely ignored by official Canada for the sake of international business arrangements.

The Trade Tower attacks marked the first time Americans had suffered the sort of mass violence their government has long inflicted on resource-rich but poorly armed nations. Unfortunately, the massive U.S. military response became a gift to those eager to use force against America’s interests and allies. For geopolitical reasons, a selective rehabilitation process has been applied to a number of these former enemies.

The survivors of 9/11’s victims must now endure the spectacle of President Trump’s cozy relationship with Syrian President Jolani, a former Al Qaeda leader installed as an American proxy to protect Israeli interests. Worse still is Trump’s removal of other top Al Qaeda figures from the U.S. list of designated terrorists just days before September 11. The Trump regime’s indifference to the memory of 9/11 victims is a nauseating example of crude realpolitik.

9/11 was also a timely gift to global arms and security corporations suffering economically in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Notably, the so-called War on Terror created the conditions for the rise of corporate mercenaries operating outside national and international law.

Most commentators still ignore the Taliban’s willingness to surrender Bin Laden if evidence of his 9/11 complicity had been produced by the Bush regime. Instead of evidence, they and the Afghan population endured weeks of relentless air bombardment and a destructive NATO occupation.

The U.S. government’s early 1980s support for and subsequent abandonment of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen created the conditions for the proliferation of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and elsewhere. After hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions wasted on war, the Taliban are still ruling Afghanistan, armed with a huge stock of abandoned U.S. weapons.

That history is edited from elite commentary on the unjustified U.S. invasion of Iraq and its ongoing theft of oil profits. America’s clumsy aggression inspired legions of Islamic radicals to enter Iraq, thus creating the conditions for the rise of Islamic state, ISIS and other violent group in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

After considering the previous information, it is worth remembering Noam Chomsky’s apt notion of wholesale (state) terror versus retail (guerilla) terror to describe this subjective phenomenon. State terror is never publicly acknowledged by elite gate keepers, who prefer to cloak it as a necessary evil or good intentions gone awry.

A recent example of this ideological gatekeeping is the mainstream media’s outright support and complicity in Israel’s endless violence across the Middle East. According to the United Nations and B’Tselem, since October 7, 2023, the Israeli military has inflicted the following casualties: in Gaza, 73,000 killed and 174,000 wounded, in the West Bank, 3700 killed and 6700 wounded and in Lebanon, 9000 killed and 30,000 wounded. The dead are posthumously cast as terrorists or terror supporters with scant evidence beyond, “…Israeli government sources.”

Israeli militarism and territorial expansion continue to be facilitated by generous military, economic and diplomatic support from the U.S. and its allies. Such state terror has traditionally inspired a violent response from resistance groups, in Palestine and elsewhere.

Arab nationalism is still being supressed by the American, European and Israeli governments to prevent empowering local control of petroleum resources. The protection once lavished on dictators like Iran’s Shah is now gifted to Egypt’s Sisi, Saudi Arabia’s royals and the Gulf Emirs, all hated despots dependent on mainly U.S. favor.

The brutal marginalization of working people by these autocrats almost guarantees violent action against them and their facilitators in Canada, Europe and the U.S. Still, most Canadians remain oblivious to their government’s corporate-influenced complicity in this ongoing injustice.

Judging by recent events, the United States and its allies have learned nothing from the horrors of 9/11.