“spitting In The Face Of Truth”: Semantic Terrorism And The Triumph Of Newspeak

Terror: 1. A state of intense or overwhelming fear. 2. Violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion. 3. A very frightening or terrifying aspect. 4. Someone or something that inspires fear. 5. An extremely disruptive or annoying person or thing.

Terrorism: The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.

–The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Newspeak has triumphed. Donald Trump lambasts the left, branding them communists and “treasonous” “enemies from within.” While his “PSAs” vow that America will “never become a communist country,” he rolls out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and, like his own infatuated stan Natalie Harp, exchanges love letters with Kim Jong Un. Envious of his strongman rivals, Trump plots to muzzle the press and punish his critics and political enemies, real and imagined.

Like communism, terrorism has become the go-to word to condemn any act that threatens the status quo. The term plays on the dogmatic belief that America is an inherently moral agent. It leverages post-9/11 Islamophobic feelings of victimization to whitewash any history that contradicts this narrative. Instead of focusing their outrage on real terrorists on the right and the left and ensuring American policies don’t contribute to their rise, critics of the progressive left erect terrorist straw men and women to deflect from the atrocities of their own government and its partners in crime. An unpalatable alphabet soup of self-serving, opportunistic gaslighters –Ted Cruz, John Kennedy, Mike Rogers, Elise Stefanik, Trump, and JD Vance – have joined forces to label Abdul El-Sayed a “jihadist,” “terrorist,” and “terrorist sympathizer,” or some combination thereof. Similar slurs have been hurled at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, some coming from members of his own party like Rep. Laura Gillen, who accused him of being pro-Hamas, and Andrew Cuomo and outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, both of whom, while not explicitly slurring him by name, did not challenge those who did. In fact, Mamdani’s Islamophobic critics, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, resort to the same terrorist tactics they profess to abhor, though they refuse to recognize them as such.

In a video posted to X (Twitter) on September 22, Netanyahu falsely claimed that Mamdani was a Hamas supporter. Two days later, on September 24, in no less than the mayor’s own stomping grounds, he asked members of the United Nations General Assembly, if they “remembered the beepers?” The question, coming two years after the September 17 and 18 attacks in Lebanon and Syria, sounded more like a warning, as he held up a pager, boasting of Israel’s own act of unacknowledged terrorism that killed at least 40 people and injured 3,000, many of them civilians, when it detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies.

Significantly, Netanyahu did not ask the UNGA if it remembered the innocent civilian victims of those beepers. This is to be expected since, according to Avigdor Lieberman, Galit Distel Atbaryan, and other past and present Israeli officials, the term “innocent civilians” becomes an oxymoron when the victims are non-Israeli.

Spitting in the face of truth, Netanyahu also used his UNGA address to implicitly threaten Mamdani, whom he once again accused of being an antisemite and supporter of Hamas. The threat and accusation are reminiscent of those made by right-wing conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky against Mehdi Hasan, whom Girdusky accused on CNN’s News Night with Abby Phillip of being a Hamas supporter, telling him, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.” The network permanently banned Girdusky.

In contrast, following his own beeper threat and defamation of Mamdani, Netanyahu appeared on CNN at least once – on September 30 – with little indication that he will face the same fate as Girdusky. Apparently, it is easier for the network to ban an Islamophobic pundit from its airwaves than a corrupt, defamatory head of state war criminal. And while Girdusky shuffles back into obscurity, the Trump regime prepares to reward said war criminal with a $2.8 billion arms package to continue the carnage in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and wherever else his military might strike to create “Greater Israel.” (True, in the wake of the Republican Party’s humiliating defeat in the midterms, Trump has announced that he will halt the $4 billion annual military aid to the country by the end of the year, but given his proclivity for prevarication, we should take that claim with a Lot’s-wife-sized pillar of salt. He also said he accepted the midterm election results – before he didn’t.)

Then again, why should we care that a foreign leader and war criminal smears the mayor of New York in his own city, when Trump mocks Joe Biden in front of President Xi, the same foreign adversary Trump brutally criticized Barack Obama for hosting a state dinner in 2015? If you can insult and humiliate fellow citizens in front of foreign enemies, why shouldn’t the privilege extend to foreign guests?

Ironically, unlike Netanyahu, Mamdani has not financially enabled Hamas, an act which, outside of the Twilight Zone in which we currently find ourselves, would qualify Netanyahu as a terrorist or, at least, a terrorist-abettor who targets Palestinians and, by proxy, his own people.

The targets of these Islamophobic attacks are not limited to individuals. Ted Cruz has called on the federal government to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a foreign terrorist organization. Nancy Mace, echoing Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, has declared, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.” Incidentally, Kilmeade, who ostensibly knows the value of human life, also recommended lethal injection of the homeless and mentally ill as an alternative to imprisonment or institutionalization, or as he put it, “just kill them.”

Given the prevalence of Islamophobia among Trumpists, it would be easy to dismiss it as merely a right-wing affliction. It would also be wrong. Progressive Twitch streamer Hasan Piker has been criticized by both the right and the left – the latter always prone to shoot its messengers whenever it is politically expedient to do so – for saying America is “pound for pound” worse than Al Qaeda. Corporate, establishment Democrats demanded that Abdul El-Sayed denounce Piker. James Carville, the single-minded Cerberus of centrist Democratic punditry, vowed to quit the party if Piker remains a force within it. Nonetheless, the “Ragin’ Cajun” vulgarly criticized Haley Stevens for quite literally doing what he himself promised to do. And as if his threatened exit were not enough, he also urged Ilhan Omar to leave the partybecause she accused white men of causing most of the deaths in America. At least, unlike some Republicans, Carville didn’t call for her deportation. However, the party’s big tent seems to have a lot of self-directed exit signs. Odd since, to mix metaphors, rats usually flee a sinking ship, not a buoyant one.

Still, the wrath of the fair-weather left and hypocritical right has fallen on Piker. Somehow, others who have made careers out of making provocative statements have escaped pillory. Consider Ann Coulter. Twenty years ago, Time magazine’s John Cloud wrote of the provocateur:

Americas [sic] obsession with loving or hating Coulter is a psychological phenomenon almost unique in our culture. Her various epigones on Fox News can’t quite match her ability to induce people to take deeply seriously what is obvious satire. I’m not saying Coulter doesn’t believe what she says – if you talk with her mother, whos [sic] even more conservative, youll [sic] know that she does – but she knows that outrage is the blunt cousin of argument, that irony is more accessible than a thousand position papers. She knows that saying what no one else would dare to say will get her attention. It works every time, as it did this week when Coulter attacked one of America’s most hallowed, untouchable figures – the 9/11 victim.

In her 2006 book Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Cloud’s peerless provocateur wrote of the widows of 9/11 victims, “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”

According to Cloud, Coulter is a “satirist,” a performative “ironist” who may or may not mean what she says as she courts controversy and clout. One wonders if he would be as generous to Piker, who, if anything, sincerely speaks his mind. The neoliberal Cloud defends Coulter, a rabid conservative; Piker, a progressive, has become shark bait not only for the right but for a growing number of cosplaying progressives and centrist leftists.

While many on the left urged El-Sayed to distance himself from Piker, who campaigned for him and other progressives, the right has not demanded that Trump distance himself from Laura Loomer. Loomer, who has the president’s (good) ear, not only campaigned for him but also influences policy, including successfully urging him to cancel humanitarian visas for Palestinian children maimed in the genocide in Gaza who were slated to receive medical treatment in the U.S. And while Piker controversially stated “America deserved 9/11” (he has since apologized), Truther Loomer claims that 9/11 was an “inside job” (she has not apologized). Nor did she have any qualms about accompanying Trump in 2024 to a Ground Zero memorial service honoring its victims. On the contrary, she doubled down, having enjoyed the experience enough to subsequently claim that Americans “maybe need another 9/11.” (Which, if the original was an inside job, would suggest that she, like an Islamophobic Oliver Twist, is soliciting the “deep state” for a second helping.) Ironically, Loomer dismisses the tragedy with the same callous disdain with which she regards the genocide in Gaza, whose death toll is the equivalent of twenty-five 9/11s.

The party’s insufferable tactic is to prove itself “hollower” than thou if it generates votes, and to cast aside those it believes to be a political liability when they speak truth to power lest they offend its mega-donors. Hyperbole? Hardly. Piker’s “pound for pound” was an idiomatic statement comparing civilian deaths caused by the U.S. to those of Al-Qaeda, but the literal weight of destruction can be measured in terms of ordnance as well. It was reported at around the same time the U.S. government announced that it would provide Israel with 40,000 one-ton bombs. This would be in addition to the 200,000 to 223,000 tons of explosive ordnance – much of it U.S.-supplied – Israel’s U.S.-backed campaign has already rained down on Gaza since October 7, 2023. By comparison, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced the equivalent of 16,000 tons and 21,000 tons of TNT, respectively, while the Allies dropped 4,000 tons of explosives on Dresden. “Pound for pound,” whether measured in ordnance or civilian deaths, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas don’t even come close. Is Piker’s statement anti-American? Only if speaking uncomfortable truths is treasonous. But then, by that measure, so is the Smithsonian.

It’s hard to imagine corporate Democrats — the Ed Sheerans of American politics –taking a stance they believe might alienate centrists, their mega-donors, feckless independents, and disillusioned MAGAites. After all, their leadership decided in 2024 to bar a pro-Palestinian delegation of uncommitted voters from speaking at the DNC in Chicago, fearing that to do so would cost them the election. And we’ve seen how well that worked out. Unwilling to learn from its past, this is the same DNC that recently lost the Florida Senate race by refusing to back democratic socialist candidate Angie Nixon.

While the “blue nami” has washed Democrats in overwhelming numbers into Congress and inundated their Republican rivals, oddly it seems that it is the Democrats who are gasping for air, even in victory. It remains to be seen what they will do with their new “mandate.” For all the progressives’ talk of rooting out corruption and ending foreign wars of choice, the Democratic establishment’s usual suspects – Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries – predictably waver, arguing that the new Congress should prioritize affordability and stick to writing strongly worded letters.

Asymmetrical semantics is the handmaiden of asymmetrical warfare. In Gaza, the IDF, the “most moral army in the world,” “unintentionally” slaughters tens of thousands, magically transforming their mangled bodies into “collateral damage” – another feat of linguistic legerdemain that allows it to escape the reality that it is arguably one of the most murderous militaries on Earth, if not the least competent, but never by choice.

The laurels for the latter go to the U.S., Israel’s collaborator in genocide, whose reliance on “super intelligence” killed over 150 Iranians, including 123 schoolchildren, in a Tomahawk missile attack on Minab in early 2026. Given the Trump regime’s proven  cartographic illiteracy, one is thankful that the Pentagon wasn’t using “SI” when it struck Nigeria and Somalia. Not that it has made much of a difference. According to the watchdog group Airwars, in Somalia, where the Trump regime has conducted more operations than any previous administration, the number of confirmed civilian deaths ranges from 85 to 162. (The Pentagon, applying the same metric to undercount American casualties in Iran,  puts the number at only six.)

More recently, on September 1, the U.S. “mistakenly” bombed a wedding party in Kuhestak, Iran, though human intelligence, or the lack thereof, was responsible. Such mistakes are not uncommon. As CNN reports, the Air Force “accidentally” bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2008, killing 148 people. When not inadvertently bombing weddings, the U.S. has bombed bomb shelters in Iraq (1991; 408 dead), Albanian refugees (1999; 73 dead), the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (1999; 3 dead), and journalists in Baghdad (2007; 12 dead).

In the case of journalists, the U.S. has a lot more bloodletting to do to catch up to Israel’s toll of 191, a gap that may close sooner rather than later under newly promoted White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller – himself a terror (epigraphic definition 4) –if his recently announced campaign against journalists bears any resemblance to his merciless crusade against immigrants. Indeed, Miller’s hardline against leaks may be motivated by personal grievance. As reported by NPR, in 2019 the Southern Poverty Law Center leaked emails in which he recommended articles from white supremacist websites to a Breitbart News reporter and suggested they write about The Camp of the Saints, the infamous 1973 French anti-immigrant novel. The leak prompted calls from Congressional Democrats and civil rights groups for Miller’s resignation. It may also be fueled by more recent leaks of private Signal text messages in which he recommended that conservative white women be mobilized to pressure white men to vote in the 2024 election.

The agents of these military atrocities rationalize them as the unintentional consequences of the fog of war – “military oops,” not military ops. Not that this distinction matters to the dead and those they leave behind.

But the semantics of deception do not allow us to name such acts terrorism. At its most literal, terrorism is an act that produces fear; a terrorist is one who weaponizes that fear. Full stop. In public discourse, however, terrorism is defined not simply as the use of violence to achieve political ends, but as violence employed specifically by non-state actors. Consequently, by the self-serving definition of the powerful, state violence is not classified as terrorism: Attacks on civilian populations by Hamas are labeled terrorism; atrocities committed on a vastly larger scale by Israel are not, although both employ violence to achieve their political ends, as did Israel before it became, through political violence, a nation-state. Indeed, once political legitimacy is secured, erstwhile “terrorists” are elevated to the status of nation-builders and statesmen, including Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela, Gerry Adams, and the founders of the state of Israel.

Some scholars classify intentional acts of state violence as “state terrorism,” while global institutions that guardrail the international order classify them as “war crimes.” Civilian bombings, once permitted during wartime, were outlawed by the Geneva Convention, which classified them as criminal. Nonetheless, the designation virtually ensures that nothing will be done – war criminals address the UN – particularly if the states that commit such crimes belong to the Global North, whose nations are the primary arbitrators of international law.

Whatever the deceptive word games, today, as America bombs Iran and, by proxy, Gaza back to the Stone Age, an apparent rite of passage for American presidents since Vietnam, it is important to remember that state-sponsored terrorism is seldom directed solely at external threats. Since the 1990s, thousands of U.S. police departments have received training in crowd control, the use of force, and surveillance from Israel, a practice that escalated significantly following 9/11, as did the surveillance of Muslim communities. As the Foreign Policy in Focus reported in 2018, “The Israeli forces mowing down unarmed Palestinian protesters also train U.S. police forces that brutalize communities of color.” The training also includes ICE.

It would seem that not only do the chickens come home to roost, but so, too, do the terrorists – and their tactics – however defined.

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