The June 24 Saudi Arabian bombing led President Clinton to warn that “the cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished.” If there is one act more predictable than the Pledge of Allegiance before school, it’s the invocation of “cowardice” by U.S. presidents every time a bomb goes off. Just a week earlier, on June 15, speaking of an IRA bomb that was detonated in Manchester, the president condemned “this brutal and cowardly act of terrorism.”
The locution was popular in the Reagan administration, and the tradition, in this country at least, dates back to the Carter administration, when two pro-Palestinian mayors on the West Bank were blown up in their booby-trapped cars (“cowardly acts”) in 1980. But every country has adopted it. When a bus bomb killed 20 in Israel in March, Spain spoke out against “blind and cowardly terrorism,” German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel described the attack as “cowardly and abhorrent,” and Boutros Boutros-Ghali called it a “a brutal and cowardly act.” The fons et origo of this oratorical set piece, as far as we can tell, was the Vatican. On December 15, 1969, Pope Paul VI referred to Maoist bombings in Rome and Milan as “cowardly and wicked terrorist misdeeds.”
“Wicked” is more like it. There’s something weird about calling terrorists cowardly. Sure, they don’t engage in open, head-to-head warfare, but as a matter of simple fact, they’re rather bold. Let’s not forget that the latest attack was in response to Saudi Arabia’s recent beheading of four other terrorists. The cowardly avoid doing things that might get them beheaded. Enough already. Try “wicked,” or, better still, “evil.”
