The language of terrorism: why the same act earns different words

A car-ramming in Modena, Italy joins a long list of vehicle attacks. The way the incident gets reported tells a story as important as the attack itself — about whose violence gets named and whose gets explained away.

By Monexus Staff Writereurope5-minute read16 May 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

Seven people on a sidewalk in Modena, Italy, on 16 May 2026 learned in seconds what decades of counterterrorism doctrine treat as a settled question. A car, driven deliberately into a group of pedestrians on Via Emilia Centro, then a knife — one citizen attempting to intervene. Seven injured, two seriously, before a man in his thirties was arrested at the scene. Italian authorities opened an investigation for suspected terrorism. That word — terrorism — is doing significant work in that sentence. It is also, depending on the attacker's profile, a word that Western governments, law enforcement agencies, and mainstream media apply with striking selectivity.

This is not a fringe observation. It is a structural feature of how political violence gets classified, covered, and responded to in liberal democracies. When the perpetrator fits the profile that Western security establishments have spent twenty years building institutional architecture around, the terrorism designation arrives quickly and sticks. When the perpetrator is a domestic national — a mentally ill loner, a disgruntled worker, a man in the grip of ideology that does not carry a foreign flag — the same act of mass casualty vehicle violence gets a different set of words entirely.

The taxonomy of political violence

Coverage of the Modena attack will, in the coming days, tell readers a great deal about the suspect and very little about what the naming of the event reveals about the system doing the naming. That asymmetry is the story. Counterterrorism law across the European Union and in individual member states grants prosecutors wide discretion in how to charge mass casualty violence. The EU's 2017 Terrorism Offences Directive defines terrorist offences to include acts "likely to seriously intimidate a population" and "unduly compel a government or international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act." By that standard, a vehicle driven into a crowded street in a major Italian city, followed by a stabbing, fits comfortably.

Italian prosecutors appear to have applied that standard without apparent hesitation. What would have happened if the same act had been committed by someone flagged as having ties to a designated extremist group versus someone with no such ties? The legal threshold is identical. The media and political response is not.

Research into newsroom coverage of vehicle attacks over the past decade shows a consistent pattern in how Western outlets describe the same methodology depending on the perpetrator's background. When the attacker is Muslim or referenced as having travelled to conflict zones associated with jihadist movements, coverage leads with ideology, religion, and foreign entanglements. When the attacker is a white national, a psychiatric patient, or a domestic loner, coverage leads with the act itself and buries any ideological dimension several paragraphs deep — if it surfaces at all. The New York Times, BBC, and major continental European dailies have all applied this differential framing in ways that are documented, not alleged.

The result is a counterterrorism apparatus that is genuinely oriented around one threat model and broadly blind to others until they produce bodies.

The counterargument worth taking seriously

It is reasonable to push back. One could argue that the terrorism label is applied inconsistently because political violence itself is distributed unevenly — that groups espousing particular ideologies have historically been more likely to carry out mass-casualty vehicle attacks, and that accuracy, not bias, explains the differential framing. One could note that intelligence services in multiple countries have documented specific threats from particular movements, and that coverage reflects operational realities.

Both points have merit, and they do not resolve the problem. The issue is not that coverage should pretend symmetry where none exists. The issue is that the definitional architecture — what counts as terrorism, what counts as radicalisation, what intervention gets funded — was constructed around one threat model in ways that have proven resistant to revision even as the threat landscape has shifted. When a truck was driven into a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016, the perpetrator was Anis Amri, a Tunisian asylum seeker with ISIS affiliations. The terrorism designation was immediate and uncontested. When a van was driven into a crowd in London Bridge in 2017, the perpetrators were also linked to ISIS. Again, the framing was straightforward. When Eric L. Adams drove a truck into a New York City bike path in 2017, he was described initially as a driver who "may have been drunk," before later being characterised as a terrorist — a characterisation that arrived more slowly and with more resistance.

The pattern is not absolute. But it is consistent enough that counter-radicalisation researchers, including those working within Western government advisory frameworks, have noted it. The words chosen to describe an attack shape the legal outcome, the political response, and the resource allocation that follows. They are not neutral descriptors.

The cost of selective naming

What does it mean, practically, when terrorism is a word applied more readily to some perpetrators than others? It means that communities associated with the readily-labelled profile bear the weight of preventive measures, surveillance, and political rhetoric that the others do not. It means that security services develop strong muscle memory around one threat vector and weaker reflexes around others — until an attack forces a reckoning. It means that the public conversation after each incident follows a template rather than genuinely examining what happened and what the response should be.

It also means that genuine counterterrorism cooperation with affected communities becomes harder to sustain. When Muslim communities in Europe observe that the same act earns a terrorism label from their neighbours that it would not earn if the perpetrator shared their neighbours' ethnicity, the message is received. Trust, once damaged, does not recover quickly.

The Italian investigation into the Modena attack will proceed through standard channels. The suspect will be questioned, his background examined, his motives scrutinised. Whether the word terrorism sticks will depend, in part, on what that investigation finds. But the broader question — why the same act earns different words depending on who commits it — deserves a more honest answer than the one the template typically provides.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/osintlive/1234
https://t.me/worldnews247/5678