The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

Partisan warfare, terrorism and a new nomos 103
the United States, it is actually against all ‘infidels’, in particular those in
Western societies, because this Islamist view considers all modernity, represented
by the West, to be an attack against the faith of Islam. 6
For the religious terrorist, violence is first and foremost a sacramental act or
divine duty executed in direct response to some theological demand or imperative.
Thus, religious terrorism is more theological than political, since its perpetrators
are unconstrained by political, moral or practical constraints that may
affect other terrorists. Like Che Guevara in his ‘Message to the Tricontinental’,
religious terrorists are engaged in what they regard as a total war. They seek to
appeal to no other constituency than themselves. Their goal is not war as usually
understood, but annihilation of the foe. Thus:
Annihilation of the foe, however, is the attempt (claim) to create ex nihilo
[from nothing], to create a new world on the basis of a tabula rasa.
Whoever wants to annihilate me is not my enemy, but my satanic pursuer.
The question that I should ask in relation to him no longer can be answered
politically, but only theologically. The most concrete type of dialectical
theology comes about when the annihilator claims that he wants nothing
more than to annihilate the annihilator.
(Schmitt 1991: 190)
While political terrorists tend to cloak themselves in the terminology of military
jargon, and consciously portray themselves as bona fide fighters, if not soldiers,
the most radical religious terrorists do not even demand to be treated as
prisoners of war (POWs). And, I would strongly argue here, that they should not
be, because terrorists are not soldiers. 7 This is as true for secular terrorists as for
religious terrorists. In normal war, that is, in war as it has been fought during the
European epoch of international law, there are rules and accepted norms of
behavior that prohibit the use of certain types of weapons, proscribe various
tactics, and outlaw attacks on specific categories as targets. In theory, if not
always in practice,
the rules of war as codified in the Hague and Geneva conventions, not only
grant civilian non-combatants immunity from attack, but also prohibit
taking civilians as hostages, impose regulations governing the treatment of
POWs, outlaw reprisals against civilians or POWs, recognize neutral territory
and the rights of citizens of neutral states.
(Hoffman 1998: 34)
Fighters who do not wear uniforms, have no rank, do not display weapons
openly, target civilians, and in some cases commit suicide in order to perpetrate
mass murder have no status in any conventions of war. One of the fundamental
principles, if one can call it that, of international terrorism is a refusal to be
bound by rules of warfare and codes of conduct. 8 Even a cursory view of terrorist
practices over the past few years demonstrates that they have violated all