At the time this story was filed, details of the Las Vegas mass shooting are still emerging.
So far, we know that over 50 people have died and hundreds have been injured. Heroic and heartbreaking tales are coming to light as America mourns and Australians offer their condolences.
And while many details of the horrific shooting remain unknown, questions still remain as to whether the shooting was a massacre perpetrated by a lone gunman, with no terrorist affiliations or whether the shooting was actually a terrorist attack on American soil.
Earlier this year, Australians also questioned the motives of the man behind Melbourne’s Bourke Street attack. At the time of the incident, as media rushed to make sense of loss of human life, experts and audiences questioned whether the rampage was a terrorist attack or not.
Even if the method that kills and injures people is the same, there is clearly a difference between terrorism and other violent crimes.
But according to Victoria Police, the Bourke Street massacre wasn’t a terrorist attack. It was deemed to be a massacre. The man who has been charged over the massacre, Dimitrious Gargasoulas, is alleged to have a long history of family violence, mental illness and drug use.
Given the nature of the tragedy, this labelling has confused a lot of people. Even if the method that kills and injures people is the same, is there is a difference between terrorism and other violent crimes?
How do we identify one from another?
In many ways, terrorist acts are quite simple to identify from other violent crimes, says Keiran Hardy, a counter-terrorism expert based in Queensland. He adds that motivation is the key difference.
“This is key to distinguishing some attacks, like that in Bourke Street, from terrorism. The prosecution would not likely be able to prove a religious, political or ideological motive behind that attack.
“In addition, while that attack certainly intimidated the public, the prosecution may not have been able to prove this was its intended effect,” Hardy explains.
Another important difference is if the attacker has any links to extremists or fundamentalist groups, such as Islamic State.
In Australia, terrorism has been defined in law, stating that it is intended to advance a “political, religious or ideological cause”, intended to “coerce or influence a government by intimidation, or intimidate a section of the public”, and “causes one in a list of specified harms, including death, serious injury, or serious property damage.”
Historically, terrorism has been committed in small, isolated acts, including the 1914 assassination of Austrian duke Franz Ferdinand, whose death set off World War I.
In Australia, terrorism has been defined in law, stating that it is intended to advance a “political, religious or ideological cause”...
Terrorism’s history is rooted in both the Middle East and Europe, with the word “terrorism” coming from the French Revolution in the late 18th century, meaning “system or rule by terror”. During its earlier days, terrorism was usually political assassinations, such as the murder of the Russian royal family in 1907, a symbolic and bloody fight between power and people.
It’s important to note that former South African president, Nelson Mandela, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is considered a hero to millions of people across the world, was considered by both the United Kingdom and the United States to be part of a terrorist organisation in his youth, for which he was jailed for 27 years.
Fergal Davis, senior lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales, explains that there has long been dispute about how to define terrorism, noting that not even the United Nations has been able to definitively define what it is.
“The political power of a phrase such as terrorism stems from the fact that groups employ it to denigrate and undermine their opponents: the Irish Republican Army (IRA) frequently referred to the terrorism of the British government without hint of irony or self-awareness [and] both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict throw it around,” he says.
Davis says the political benefit of keeping the act of terrorism vague is that the word can be used indiscriminately to suit certain political agendas.
“Agreeing on a definition of terrorism would restrain its use,” he says. “It does not suit the purposes of many states to have terrorism defined: either because they do not want some actions to be defined as “terrorist”; or because they want to term something “terrorist”, where in reality the word is inappropriate.”
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