The Brooklyn Rail

During the New York City mayoral race, a certain corner of the internet convinced itself that Zohran Mamdani was both a communist threat and a jihadist sleeper cell, an impressive feat of ideological mind-bending. You might even recall accounts of a Republican state representative on X circulating grainy footage of the Twin Towers being attacked, paired with a warning to “wake up New York,” as though the real danger to New Yorkers in 2025 was not unaffordable rent or climate catastrophe but a Muslim mayor who tweets about tenant protections and free bus rides for all. In response, many did what online politics now trains us to do: meet hysteria with mockery. Days before the vote, videos emerged of Mamdani drifting from club to club, including a late-night stop at a gay bar. “So it’s 1am and Zohran just showed up at the gay bar,” one user posted. Another retweeted: “Radical jihadist.”

The joke landed because the threat was so obviously spectral that it laid bare the racist projection masquerading as public safety. The right’s efforts to associate Mamdani with terrorism had little to do with the substance of his politics and everything to do with the racialized, Islamophobic imaginaries projected on Muslim identities. Yet it is one thing to make light of Mamdani’s portrayal as a terrorist, and another to reckon with what that label enables once the state itself takes it up as a mechanism of repression.

If the early 2000s framed terrorism as something arriving from elsewhere, today governments have redirected the term inward, weaponizing “radicalism” to recode protest as threat. The UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action, a group whose goal is to end “global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime,” is a striking example. Though its members target buildings, infrastructure and equipment—aiming to disrupt the supply chain of the Israeli military-industrial complex, not people—the organization has been labelled as a terrorist group under Terrorism Act 2000 and placed on a list that includes Al Qaeda, the Ulster Defence Association and the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division. Since the proscription came into law in early July 2025, a wave of arrests have swept up around 2,700 retirees, students, and activists whose most dangerous weapon is often a banner. At the time of writing this, Amnesty International reports that 254 of these protesters have so far been charged with terrorism-related offences under the UK’s counter-terror legislation, and more charges are threatened against the arrested protesters.

As writer Huw Lemmey argues in his essay “Who’s afraid of Palestine Action?,” this isn’t mere overreach but strategy. Lemmey lucidly points out how the UK government denounces Israeli atrocities rhetorically while enabling them materially, and how anyone who interrupts this contradiction becomes a threat. “Terrorism” then becomes less a descriptor of violence than a defence of complicity. The more the state participates in terror, the more urgently it must displace the term onto others. Meanwhile, the real atrocities—bombardment, siege, the starvation of civilians—are framed as security measures. If the word “terror” still means anything, Lemmey suggests, it increasingly describes what states do, not what they claim to fear.

When being “radicalized” is stretched to cover everything from student protesters to aging retirees with placards, the question that must follow is perhaps not what is radical, but who gets to decide. And why the language of “radicalization” is applied to those who resist state violence rather than to the state practices that generate it.

In Peter Brook’s 1968 Tell Me Lies, the question of what constitutes a meaningful, or radical, response to distant violence becomes both the film’s narrative and its unresolved moral crux, with the war in Vietnam as its backdrop. A self-described semi-documentary, it follows three Londoners—Mark, Pauline, and Bob—as they confront fellow citizens with images of mutilated Vietnamese children and ask what such images demand of them. In its opening sequences, the film wanders through “Angry Arts Week”: concerts, floats, films, debates, symposiums, back-garden fundraisers, theater productions, and readings of letters by people opposing the war. Protestors gather in the streets, outside Downing Street, at the US Embassy, offering every sanctioned form of moral performance available. When someone is asked what they think all this will achieve, the answer is painfully earnest: “This week might just catch the ears of the powers that be. If it did that it would be worthwhile.”

The film is not, as Brook insisted, about Vietnam itself, but about what the war means to those who live comfortably amid its fallout, and the inadequacy of these polite, recognizable gestures in the face of mass violence perpetrated or enabled by the state. But it soon reaches other kinds of confrontation. In two of the film’s most haunting sequences, Brook includes archival footage of the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon in 1963, and re-stages the final moments before Norman Morrison set himself on fire outside the Pentagon in 1965. Both became martyr figures in Vietnam, sanctified as people who made their own body the site of protest when every other political route collapsed. But the actions are also measured against their perceived effectiveness, as an American in London reflects after hearing a testimony from Morrison’s wife: “The tragedy is that the United States seems to have either no reaction or a reaction of repression… The government seems incapable of learning from the people who are trying to teach them something or protesting against them.”

When Aaron Bushnell, a young American airman, set himself on fire in February 2024 outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, denouncing the genocide in Gaza, the reaction replayed the fractures Tell Me Lies identified decades earlier: horror, yes, but also a troubled recognition of why someone might resort to such an extreme act. In the film, Bob asks, “What is there that we feel so deeply about that we burn ourselves to death?” Bushnell forced us once more to confront that question. Self-immolation harms no one but the person who performs it; its violence is inward, tearing through the fiction that dissent must remain polite, procedural, or comfortably symbolic. One might call it a form of self-terrorism, not to sensationalize the act, but to reveal the perversity of a state that brands property damage terrorism while treating the destruction of entire populations as foreign policy.

The political conditions that drove Thích Quảng Đức and Norman Morrison to such acts have only deepened. However extreme, Bushnell’s self-immolation doesn’t sit outside the present; it exposes it. When every sanctioned avenue has been cut off, which forms of dissent remain available to us? What counts as too much, or too little, when the violence we oppose is carried out elsewhere but enabled at home? And if governments now label nonviolent obstructions “terrorism,” while participating in or abetting the terrorization of entire populations, how must we recalibrate what we understand as “radical”?

This is not a prescription, but a diagnosis. When state power treats outrage as an inconvenience and morality as a threat, a vacuum opens around what constitutes meaningful dissent. What appears excessive under such conditions is often an attempt to meet reality at its own scale. In his final message, Bushnell measured his protest against what Palestinians endure under occupation, stating that it was “not extreme at all,” but “what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

“Radical” names both a strategy of state discreditation and a language the left often uses too casually. In one register, it strips struggles of legitimacy; in another, it risks becoming an empty badge. As Bushnell’s words remind us, the urgency lies less in reclaiming the term than in organizing a direct and meaningful challenge to the normalization of state violence and control—and in asking what such organizing requires of us today.