Why Imperialists and Their Lackeys Hide Behind the Word “Terrorism”

Editorial

The degenerate US imperialist ruling class and their monopoly media mouthpieces cannot utter the name of Hamas without affixing the term “terrorist”, “Iran-backed”, or tacking on the most absurd accusations against them. They aim to elicit an immediate emotional reaction, fabricating the most vile and slanderous accusations imaginable—for example, mutilating women, rape, placing babies in ovens, and so on—so that their audience not only does not think about things rationally, but to stir up such a hysteria that anyone who is labeled as sympathetic to Palestinian liberation is met with a torrent of frenzied irrationalism.

All bourgeois ideologies rely on irrationalism to varying degrees. The bourgeoisie can never produce a thorough scientific social analysis because of the fact that their dictatorship is transient, like all matter. To the degree that they propagate a scientific viewpoint, it is only to hide and further perpetrate their crimes. A dying monster gripped in a feverish death throe confuses its furious thrashings as a sign of vitality. It cannot conceive of its own demise, and so it propagates this notion of invincibility and immortality—exemplified with the latest obsession of imperialist politicians with the US military being “the most lethal fighting force in the world” as well as the infamous declarations of the “end of history” and the supposed unipolar world order following the collapse of the revisionist USSR in 1991.

Anything that challenges this delusion causes the greatest uproar, exaggerations and pretensions to cover up the objective insecurity of their position. This explains “Trumpism” and his second presidency, a figure who best encapsulates the erratic attempts to portray the vitality of the decaying husk of imperialism through his clumsy puppeteering. Trump more than any other representative of imperialism best embodies this desperate projection of power, the paper tiger who promises swift and violent rebukes but is forced by reality to negotiate directly with the same people he calls “terrorists” and promises to annihilate in an instance.

What they want to hide is that Hamas and the Palestinian resistance militarily defeated US-Israeli forces. This has several important implications. For one thing, it demonstrates that the Palestinian resistance has popular support, which immediately calls the label of “terrorism” into question. US-funded polls across Palestine show that the vast majority of Palestinians support Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and that following it, popular support for Hamas doubled across Palestine and even tripled in some areas, making it the most popular party among Palestinians. Here the imperialists and their lackeys will be divided, with some trying to make all sorts of excuses for why there is such support for them, while others will take it to its natural conclusion and argue for the complete elimination of all Palestinians. Genocide is not simply a policy of imperialism, but a fundamental aspect of it.

Secondly, it shows that the masses, under proper leadership, can be armed and organized to overcome the imperialists and their lackeys by force of arms. This deals a significant blow not only to imperialism, but also its ideological currents of revisionism and opportunism, who have spent the last several decades bowing before the imperialists in a pessimistic fervor, propagating all sorts of phony and capitulationist perspectives like “surveillance capitalism” and “abolitionism”. Gaza, the most surveilled and oppressed place in the world, a concentration camp, was still able to rebel and successfully so by force of arms. In their shame, such reformists will jump to the arguments of the enemy camp, denounce the resistance and claim various conspiracy theories to justify their own treachery.

Finally, these perspectives arm the oppressed and exploited of the world with the knowledge that they too can carry out their own Al-Aqsa Floods, that under revolutionary leadership, the masses can be organized and armed and give the greatest expression to their fury directly against the monsters that torture them. This is what the term “terrorism” and its associated hysteria is directed against—the end of imperialist rule, which will mark the true beginning of human history.

Photo: A Palestinian paraglider during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

---

The Worker is an entirely volunteer-run revolutionary newspaper free from and radically antagonistic to corporate influence. We rely on the support of our readers to sustain our editorial line in service of the working class and the reconstitution of its party, the Communist Party. Make a one-time or recurring donation to our newspaper today: