In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on February 25, 2007

I recently became aware of a fascinating post on the TrueSpeak Institute’s web site entitled Irhabi Murderdom not Jihadi Martyrdom.  The author, Jim Guirard, quite rightly points out that within Islam the concept of “terrorist” Irhab not only exists, but is related to he concept of “unholy war” (Haribah).  And yet, as he notes, this word is not used to describe the radical Islamists who trace their lineage back to the Muslim Brotherhood by anyone in the West.

What a fascinating point! In effect, every Western politician, news outlet, etc. is not talking about “terrorists”, but about “Holy Warriors”; in effect, granting the semantic battlefield to the enemy!  To use a parallel that more in the West are familiar with, how would we have reacted to a discussion of Nazi policies if we had called them “The Freedom Fighting armies of the German people”?

Many years ago, the great Polish theoretician Alfred Korzybski wrote about what he called “semantic reactions”.  A “semantic reaction” is, in its simplest form, a “gut reaction” to a stimulus (usually symbolic).  Politicians and, especially, their pollsters, are intimately familiar with this concept – remember Monica Lewinski and President Clinton’s 7 months of silence? Anthropologists, both Linguistic Anthropologists and Symbolic Anthropologists are also aware of this concept – we use it to build and describe “semantic webs” or “networks of meaning” within a culture or sub-culture.

The time has come to call a spade a spade or, in this case, a terrorist an Irhabi.

Category: Anthropology, COIN
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