Laura Blumenfeld’s article, “The Apology: Letters from a Terrorist” is a detailed account of her interactions with the person who had shot at her father. Speaking to his family and writing to him she tries to understand the reasons for his action. The back and forth writing ends with Laura telling Omar and his family who she really is and omar writes her father a letter of apology. Laura’s article is not only a personal account but raises important questions over the issue of terrorism and how the notion of revenge plays into it. Terrorism is not only fuelled by religious, political and social reasons but also by a need to see justice served for the wrongs committed on a group. The desire to seek revenge and punish an individual, a group or a country might not be personal as evidenced by Omar’s action but could be retribution for a collective wrong. Omar shoots at Laura’s father because he is a symbol of the ‘collective’ that has hurt Omar’s people.
People have an innate need to look at their world as being predictable, stable with a sense of order. Perceiving their world in this manner gives them a sense of belonging, control over their lives and helps balance their mental health (Greenberg et al., 1997). This perception of a stable, orderly world is contributed by the Belief in a Just World. People subscribing to this belief usually hold conservative ideals and a heightened sense of what is right and wrong (Lerner, Miller, & Holmes 1976). When their belief in a just world is shattered and challenged, they experience fear, anxiety and vulnerability. In case of a terrorist event that shatters their normal world, individuals experience different emotions. In some cases they might believe that the victims deserved their fate. But this feeling is non-existent when these individuals identify with the victims. In such cases victims blaming is replaced by sympathy or the need for retribution. Getting retribution is an effective technique for protecting one’s belief that the world is just and for reestablishing moral order (Lerner 1980). There is a dehumanizing process that happens when people seek revenge. When people seek revenge on others, they look at them not as individuals but as a symbol of threat.In his letters to laura, Omar calls her father a ‘chosen millitary site”. Omar picks Laura’s father at random and shoots at him because he is an American and a, Jew standing for everything the Palestinians had come to fear and hate. Omar’s father talks of Omar’s action as a duty, something every Palestinian would understand. He says that Justice would be served this way. His brother calls it not a personal vendetta but a sort of a public relations idea. People and the media would now pay attention to their cause. Although the terrorist act has been committed as an act of revenge, there are no personal feelings involved in the attack. The victim and the perpetrator are not known to each other. However their paths cross because the two of the are microcosms of their ‘collective’.
De la Corte in his research on the psychological framework of terrorist organizations and terrorists have found that the beliefs and arguments identify a collective enemy as responsible for injustices, offences or threats and insults.These go on to them creating stereotypes of their enemies. This also leads to them transferring the same pain caused to them, stops from feeling humane thoughts for the enemy and activates the desire for revenge(De la Corte 2005).” Terrorists attack public places or a crowd in order to gain as much as visibility and reaction to the attack. They want their grievances to be heard and choose their targets well so that enough publicity would be given to that act. The target also becomes just an object of hate or a pawn that would help them in taking the message across. In the case of Omar and Laura’s father, Omar belonged to the Palestinian community. They had lost their homeland because of Israel’s aggression and the war. The loss of homeland, security, continued harassment, fear and anxiety had forced him to seek revenge to make it right. Laura’s father was a symbol of the enemy who had put through the palestinian’s through their present harried and stateless existence and hence he was chosen as the target. For Omar it did not matter that laura’s father could have had nothing to do with the war or could have had sympathetic feelings towards his cause. All that mattered to him was taking the message of revenge across and the desire to seek justice for the wrongs committed against his people.
Omar takes a long time to reply to laura to explain the reason for the shooting as he does not see it as a personal attack. The attack was against a collective and not against an individual. While it was personal for Laura, the attack was not so personal for Omar. His belief in a just world and revenge was stronger than any moral or ethical considerations and shooting or killing another human being was nothing more than an act of retribution. Revenge however is not the only motive for a terrorist attack. Terrorists act out because of their subscription to an extreme ideology, they indulge in terrorist attacks to usher in a revolution, they join a terrorist group out of kinship or peer pressure. Terrorism is also not a syndrome but is something that also influences social and political processes in a society. Minority groups which had felt victimized for long and have found out that the normal means of redressal do not work, resort to terrorist actions to gain the attention of the majority or of the world. Such attacks could either lead to sympathy for the cause or the mindless attacks could lead to them being shunned and targeted once again. In the case of Omar, he finds sympathy for his action among his family and kinsmen. However the state finds no sympathy for his cause or his action and instead sentenced him to prison for 25 years. In the apology letter that Omar writes to Laura’s father, he apologizes to him on a personal level. He is sorry for hurting him and causing pain. However he justifies his act by saying that both him and Laura’s father were victims of historical injustices. Although the attack was not a personal decision,the apology becomes personal. Even then there is a sense of justification for the attack. By implying and calling them as mutual sufferers of historical wrongdoing Omar hopes to justify his actions and hope that Laura’s father would understand why he did what he did.
Thus people have an innate need to have some sort of order, peace, and regularity in their social world. When that order is being threatened or challenged, they feel vulnerable, anxious and scared. While in some it can cause a mental imbalance, some resort to retributive measures to make the wrong right. There is a heightened need for justice that has to be served. Terrorists, lone gunmen and disturbed people are not the only ones who seek justice. Ordinary people who identify with the victims of an unjust act also in a passive way support calls for retribution. When Americans overwhelmingly voted for the war on terror, it was a result of the fear and the need for justice that came out of the attack. The safe world that they had known for so long had collapsed and they had to punish the people who were responsible for it as well as try and do something to restore their world to the way it was. In the case of Omar and the palestinians who have been rendered stateless and who had seen family and friends killed revenge and small terrorist attacks not only bring them a sense of justice being served but also draw attention to their cause. Thus apart from social, political and ideological reasons, revenge is also a strong motive for terrorist attacks.
Works Cited
Blumenfeld, Laura. “The Apology: Letters from a Terrorist.” The New Yorker. 4 Mar 2002. Web. 9 Apr 2016.
De la Corte, Luis. Explaining Terrorism: A Psychosocial Approach. Perspectives on Terrorism. 1.2 (2007).
Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. Terror management theory of self-esteem and cultural worldviews: Empirical assessments and conceptual refinements. In M.P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 29, pp. 61–139). San Diego. CA: Academic Press. 1997.
Lerner, M.J. The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum Press. 1980.
Lerner, M.J., Miller, D.T., & Holmes, J.G. Deserving and the emergence of forms of justice. In L. Berkowitz & E. Walster (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 9, pp. 133–162). New York: Academic Press. 1976.
