In 1960 my buddy Poobah and I went to see Psycho at the Crest Theater in Wichita, Kansas. It scared us so much that when we got back to his house around 11pm, we turned on all the lights and checked all the closets (his folks were out of town).
Webster’s dictionary defines terrorism as “The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion”. By this definition, Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, and soundtrack composer Bernard Herrmann could be classified as terrorists, since Psycho systematically terrorised audiences out of their wits. The three of them certainly succeeded in terrifying Poobah and me.
Guilty of being Afghan?
On 26 November this year, 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal shot two National Guard soldiers multiple times with a .357 Magnum pistol in what was called an ‘ambush style’ attack near the White House. One of the guards died, the other is in a critical condition. Lakanwal was also wounded.
Within hours, we saw headlines like “FBI launches terror probe after Washington shooting”. FBI director Kash Patel held a news conference, telling reporters “It is an ongoing investigation of terrorism … That is what a broad-based international terrorism investigation looks like”. There was in fact no evidence that Lakanwal was a terrorist. But he is Afghan. That’s enough to raise the suspicion he might be part of some international terrorist plot.
Of course, Kash Patel isn’t the only administration official dealing in unfounded conclusions. In this field Trump is Numero Uno. Remember when he was running for president in 2016 and said that Mexicans coming into America were drug dealers, criminals and rapists? (Adding a brief caveat that “some were good people”).
Anyway, it didn’t take long to find out that Lakanwal lived in a small town in Washington state with a wife and five children. He had worked under the CIA in Afghanistan, ironically in a counterterrorism unit, and came to the USA officially in 2021. Moreover, the Trump administration granted him asylum in April this year. When a reporter at the press conference asked about this, Trump jumped all over her, calling her “a stupid person”. Trump has the best words.
“Kill everybody”
As more information becomes public, it appears less and less likely that Lakanwal is a part of some terrorist plot. He has been charged with first degree murder. Evidence also indicates that he has been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
America has experienced a lot of ‘potential’ terrorism recently. Politicians and conspiracy junkies readily slap that term on to all sorts of suspicious-looking situations and individuals. The media eat it up.
Thomas Crooks, for example, the 20-year-old who attempted to kill Trump in 2024, was immediately the subject of ongoing investigations for “potential terrorism”, though no conclusion about this has been reached.
Some quickly labelled Tyler Robinson, 22, who murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk this year, a potential terrorist. A former Justice Department counsel for domestic terrorism is reported on NBC to have said that “while Kirk’s assassination appears to meet the definition of domestic terrorism, finding a federal charge to bring against the shooter might be a challenge”.
The Trump administration is currently waging war against what they term ‘narco-terrorists’ in the Caribbean, specifically Venezuela, and in the Pacific. Since September the USA has blown up 23 boats and killed 87 people. The administration has no evidence these boats carried narcotics, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth allegedly authorised the Navy in one case to “kill everybody”. He denies it.
Post 9/11 terror
The term ‘terrorism’ has been around for three centuries. We got a modern taste of it back in 1998, on Friday, 7 August at 10.38am, when an Al Qaeda cell bombed the American embassy in Dar es Salaam. Another cell simultaneously bombed the American embassy in Nairobi where 213 died, 12 of them Americans. And in Dar, Al Qaeda killed 11, of whom six were Muslim, none was American.
This year, in the Nov 22–28 edition of The East African, three out of six news briefs mentioned terrorism. One informs us that “The United States is considering actions such as sanctions and Pentagon engagement in counterterrorism as part of a plan to compel Abuja to better protect Christian communities and religious freedom.”
The use of the word became widespread in America after 9/11. President Bush began his address to the nation that night calling the hijacked planes flown into the World Trade Center Towers and Pentagon “deadly terrorist acts”. They definitely terrified a lot of people, including me, 8,000 miles away.
I heard that one of the planes, United 93 that ploughed into a Pennsylvania field, had originated in Newark, New Jersey. My buddy Poobah was a United pilot and often flew out of Newark. I raced to the nearest internet café (very few individuals in Tanzania had internet at home in 2001) and sent a three-word email: “R U OK?” He replied: “I R OK.”
Fear of Muslims
People fear what they don’t know. Most Americans didn’t know anything about Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or jihad on 9/11. Most Americans probably had never met a Muslim. I expect many thought Muslims were Arabs who dressed like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Four days after 9/11, Balbir Singh Sodhi was killed in Mesa, Arizona. Frank Roque, enraged about 9/11, had said he wanted to shoot some “towel heads”. Sodhi had a beard and wore a turban. He was a Sikh from the Punjab.
The Maasai have a proverb “The eye that sees is the one that went out of the house.” (Wisdom of Maasai by A. Ol’Oloisolo Massek and J. O. Sidai). In 2023, just 96mn Americans ‘went out of the house’ – 72.4% went to Mexico, Canada and Europe and less than 20% visited a developing country. Just 0.8% came to Africa.
Trump has played on ignorance and xenophobia to rile up his base right from the get-go. In December 2015 at a campaign rally, he called for “a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. And what did he do just recently, after the two National Guards were shot? He announced he would “permanently pause” immigration from “third world” countries, many predominantly Muslim.
The administration has also stopped processing asylum cases, except for white South Africans. They intend a “full-scale, rigorous re-examination of every green card [permanent resident] for every alien from every country of concern”. Permanent residents (12.8mn) are now ‘aliens’, like ET. Worse, Trump says he “absolutely” would denaturalise some legitimate American citizens if he could.
What’s truly terrifying
The fact is that very few people die in terrorist attacks – an average of 20,000 annually worldwide. By comparison, around 9million died of heart disease in 2021; COVID-19 took well over 8million; 2million passed away due to dementia. Malaria kills 600,000 annually, two-thirds of them children. More people die from lightning strikes (24,000 a year) than in terrorist attacks.
Trump, meanwhile, in the name of his war on terror and making cities ‘safe’, has masked and armed federal agents arbitrarily drag men, women and children who just might be illegal refugees out of cars, schools, churches and courtrooms. No warrants necessary. They claim to be going after “the worst of the worst”. According to the Cato Institute, only 7% of those detained are violent criminals.
In addition, Trump has ordered 500 National Guards added to the over 2,200 already in Washington, D.C. in defiance of a federal court order that ruled their deployment illegal. Some believe that Trump’s aim is for Americans to get used to the sight of military on their streets. In September he said he wants to use American cities for training troops.
On 18 October, an estimated 7mn Americans participated in ‘No Kings’ demonstrations at 2,700 locations in the US and around the world. These people are terrified too – terrified that America is becoming an autocracy. Were I Sherlock Holmes, I might deduce that the most dangerous terrorist in the USA is Donald J Trump. It’s elementary.
