Editor's Introduction

War is fought on many fronts. Armed combat constitutes the most obvious one. Others include politics, diplomatic isolation, dissemination or suppression of information, curfews and restrictions of motility, manipulation of media, and economic strangulation. A powerful accompaniment of all this is the distortion and abuse of language. New words and phrases come into existence, and those already present are given new, usually malignant, meanings. The attack is thus not only on the human body and the body politic but also on language, which is fundamental to civilization.

The “war against terrorism” (itself a rather dubious phrase, seeking to create false differences between the violence of one group and that of another) is no exception. Like other wars, it is beginning to accumulate a vocabulary of its own. The most prominent member of this vocabulary is the word “terrorism” itself; elsewhere (Akhtar, 1999). I have elucidated the problems inherent in the usage of this label. Among the newer arrivals on this lexical scene are “targeted killings” (Israeli euphemism for the extrajudicial murders of Hamas leaders) and “extraordinary international renditions” (a term used by the CIA for kidnapping terrorism suspects and transporting them for interrogation to countries with no laws against torture). An unmistakable blurring between the “terrorism of the rich” and the “terrorism of the poor” (or “hi-tech terrorism” and “low-tech terrorism”) is thus rapidly occurring. However, such matters are yet to be addressed by psychoanalytically informed writings on terrorism.

For now, the focus remains upon terrorism as it is commonly understood. In other words, most of the writing in this area is about the violent acts of rather small, even though at times astonishingly “efficient,” ethno-political groups. Suicide bombings, disrupted subways, broken skyscrapers, and body parts littered around a blown-up pizza parlor are the furniture of this bloody scenario. The po