Linguistical phenomena come and go on the internet. Some are intelligent ones, and others are the academic equivalent of using wet sand to clean a fresh wound. The later ones are the kind that emerge during internet discourse in which their initiators find themselves between a rock and a hard place, and thus decide to create an argument that defies science, logic, and all laws of nature hoping that their opponent will be too confused to call their nonsense.
In an attempt to invalidate the rage many within the international community are feeling towards not just the murder of over 20 thousand Palestinian, but the contentious assassination of key figures in Gaza’s community, many pro-genocide figures have made a habit of plastering the word terrorist on anyone with a voice of significant impact in Gaza. They have even gone as far as to plaster the word terrorist onto the names of urgent professions as if it justifies the assassination of anyone who works them in Gaza.
To those confused as to the usage of the word terrorist; it’s a label tailor made for people of color who threaten the imperialistic interest of imperialist countries. Sometimes, the Venn diagram of people who fit of the description above and happen to commit acts of terror is a full circle, but that doesn’t mean that the commitment of acts of terror is a requirement to receive that label.
Terrorist doctors, terrorist academics, terrorist religious leaders, and more importantly, terrorist Journalist. Terrorist journalist has been especially confusing to me because it sounds deceivingly smart, but in reality, is a stupid person’s idea of a smart argument. That said, for the sake of argument, I decided to explore all of the possible interpretations and see if the argument of the pro-genocide crowd holds water.
The most obvious interpretation for the phrase terrorist journalist is a journalist who also happens to be a terrorist. As much as I wanted this interpretation to be true, I hit a wall as soon as I looked at reality because terrorists tend to be armed which means that not only do they have a capacity to cause damage to their opponent in a way an unarmed person can, and save themselves in a way an unarmed person can’t, but their dead bodies tend to be armed too. It has never happened that a journalist fired at anyone, nor have we ever discovered weapons on a massacred journalist.
With the most obvious meaning off the table, my second thought was what if by a terrorist journalist they meant a journalist that cover topics that make people feel terror? Wall number two materializes in front of me. Journalists are burdened with the responsibility of informing us of the most horrendous events, and they should never be punished for the reaction of a viewer to the news.
The final interpretation I reached was that a terrorist journalist is a journalist that covers the action of a terrorist which sounded like the thing they were aiming for, but then I realized that it isn’t the assassination justification they think it is. By the same logic, we should be calling doctors who treat victims of SA as rapist doctors, Vladimir Nabokov as the pedophile writer, and persecutors who handle corruption as corrupt persecutors.
Obviously, if you are hit by such an argument by someone, by the time you reach the conclusion that their argument is stupid, they will have hit you with another stupid argument that sounds deceivingly smart. That said, even if you manage to dismantle their argument in a timely manner, I wouldn’t trust the pro-genocide crowd to be bright enough to recognize the fallacies in their argument, so prepare yourself for potentially dealing with someone who refuses to see the truth, and bury their heads in the sand.
