Why Terrorists Are Misunderstood By Max Abrahms As a rule, the aggrieved are weaker than the government. So, they naturally worry that their outrage will be ignored. To overcome this power asymmetry, they sometimes wield violence in a shocking way. And nothing shocks society like attacking its civilians. Indeed, terrorists acknowledge that they turned to violence for their political message to be heard. As the leader of the Tamil Tigers put it: “The Tamil people have been expressing their grievances…for more than three decades. Their voices went unheard like cries in the wilderness.” 1 The head of the United Red Army, an obscure offshoot of the Japanese Red Army, admitted: “There is no other way for us. Violent actions…are shocking. We want to shock people everywhere…It is our way of communicating with the people.” 2 Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri likewise described September 11 as a “message with no words” which is “the only language understood by the West.” 3 Clearly, political scientists are onto something when they characterize terrorism as a “communication strategy.” 4 There’s no question that violence attracts attention. The adage “If it bleeds it leads” captures this reality. As the sociologists, Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani remind us, however, “It is the content of the message transmitted as well as the quantity of publicity received which is important for the social movement.” 5 By definition, terrorism gets noticed; otherwise, it wouldn’t terrorize. But does the attention help the perpetrators to convey their grievances? The evidence is unconvincing. In the 1980s, Michael Kelly and Thomas Mitchell did a content analysis of 158 terrorist incidents covered in the New York Times and Times of London. The terrorism seemed to “sap…its political content” as “less than 10 percent of the coverage in either newspaper dealt in even the most superficial way with the grievances of the terrorists.” 6 Historical accounts confirm that the Weather Underground could “bomb their names on to the front pages, but they could do next to nothing to make sure that the message intended by their bombings was also the message transmitted.” 7 The sociologist Charles Tilly observed that American journalists didn’t grasp the political purpose of Chechen hostage-taking in the 1990s beyond “senseless acts” of violence. 8 As Bonnie Cordes has observed, “Although terrorism is often described as a form of communication, terrorists are rather poor communicators” because “the violence of terrorism is rarely understood by the public.” 9 Indeed, terrorists themselves frequently complain that their violence was misunderstood by the target country. 10 Why is terrorism such an ineffective means for perpetrators to broadcast their desired political ends? I’ve discovered a new cognitive heuristic in international affairs called the