Invoking the figure of the “terrorist” is a racist dog whistle that depicts the Other as a monster to be quarantined while appealing to a racial ideological determination

Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, “Fear the Child: Racial and Sexual Regulation along the US–Mexico Border”, International Studies Review (2021) 23, 2021,

Meanwhile, the global rise of the figure of the terrorist is not only about material realities of the Global War on Terror nor accurate descriptions of political violence. Instead, it has functioned as an ideological determination intended to insulate settler colonies from critiques of violence while condemning anti-colonial action taken against colonizers as morally evil. Lisa Stampnitzky (2013) has carefully documented the transformation whereby terrorism has become a self-evident identity—an immoral act that can only be committed by an immoral person. The roots of this view are evident in two historic conferences on terrorism organized by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the behest of the Jonathan Institute, a think tank named after his brother who died in a raid in Entebbe, Uganda. Bringing together Israeli and US political and military leaders, Netanyahu’s father described the archetypal terrorist as “a new breed of man which takes humanity back to prehistoric times, to the times when morality was not yet born. Divested of any moral principle, he ... is also a cunning, consummate liar, and therefore much more dangerous than the Nazis, who used to proclaim their aims openly. In fact, he is the perfect nihilist.” C. Heike Schotten describes this positioning of the terrorist as “premoral and precivilization, thus in effect prehuman, calling to mind the prehistoric members of [Thomas] Hobbes’ timeless state of nature” (Schotten 2018, 136). The social category of terrorist evolved to be what Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai called “both a monster to be quarantined and an individual to be corrected ... Counterterrorism is a form of racial, civilizational knowledge, but now also an academic discipline that is quite explicitly tied to the exercise of state power” (Puar and Rai 2002, 122). Thus, the terrorist is inescapably tied to contemporary IR definitions of security, nation, and civilization. Taken together, the term terror anchor baby is a racist, sexualized dog whistle. It cannot approximate the fullness of the lives of women who risk their lives to cross militarized borders for material, familial, and political reasons. The reality of these women’s lives is much more than the pathologies that Riddle and Gohmert would believe.

The 2010 right-wing accusations united specters of the Middle East and Latin America that were epitomized through the purported collaboration between Hezbollah and Mexican drug cartels. In 2011, US federal prosecutors charged Lebanese businessman Ayman Joumaa under the Patriot Act for financing Hezbollah through a drug-smuggling network that linked US-bound cocaine, a prominent Lebanese bank, and the Zetas, the largest Mexican drug cartel. A federal jury quickly indicted Joumaa for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars to the Zetas, whosecore members were originally a disaffected part of Mexican special forces trained by Israeli Defense Forces (Correa-Cabrera 2017). Terrorism experts warned that Hezbollah would begin making inroads throughout Latin America, effectively providing yet another justification for Israeli–Latin American militarized coordination. Four months after the federal prosecution, the Committee on Homeland Security, headed by notorious New York Republican Congressman Peter King, presented hearings to the House and Senate on the case of “Hezbollah in Latin America.” There, the subcommittee on Counterterrorism argued that Hezbollah “is immersed in trafficking in weapons, drugs, and women ... [and] engaged in a strategy of asymmetric warfare on our doorstep,” pointing to Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil as “areas of potential terrorist influence” (US Congress, House, Committee on Homeland Security 2011).

While the threat of Hezbollah finding receptive collaborators through Latin America, and sneaking into the United States was found later to be false, it draws upon older cultural, political, and military relationships between the Middle East and Latin America. One of those relationships shaped European notions of civilization, as far back as the earliest Spanish encounters with indigenous peoples in the Americas. Scott Morgensen (2010) identifies the relationship between the categories of terrorist and savage through the rise of the term berdache used by early Spanish colonizers to justify indigenous tribes’ inability to rule. Morgensen traces how this term was used to condemn Muslim men as racial enemies of Christian civilization during the Crusades by linking them to the creation of berdache, or a group of “kept boys whose sex was said to be altered by immoral desire ... [whose] effeminized male leadership invited and justified conquest” (Morgensen 2010, 65). This term was also used in Peter Martyr’s account of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s 1513 expedition in Central America, when Balboa’s first act was reportedly to find forty men dressed in women’s apparel and throw them to be eaten alive by his dogs. Colonial discourses of race and transgressive sexuality travelled to mark entire communities as sexual heathens who needed European governance and regulation. This language justified the implementation of the gender binary through genocide and sexual violence across the Americas, while reinforcing the sexual practices of what Samir Amin (1989) called “the Eternal West” as appropriate and desirable.