Why People Support Those We Call Terrorists

Any why you struggle to empathise

Photo by Storyzangu Hub on Unsplash

You are sitting on your sofa. The kettle has just boiled. The news is on. A government spokesperson is being interviewed. The voices are calm, measured, and familiar. There has been an explosion in Gaza, or southern Lebanon, or somewhere in Syria. There has been a raid somewhere else. Or perhaps an airstrike in Yemen. The names change. The pattern does not. And then come the words: terrorism, security operation, shock and awe, hearts and minds.

What do these words do for you? Do they describe the world, or do they organise it?

When you hear “terrorism”, you picture something bloody, barbaric, sectarian, outside the bounds of anything recognisable as legitimate. When you hear “shock and awe”, you picture precision and overwhelming force, arrows on a map, a strategy designed to end conflict quickly and decisively. When you hear “hearts and minds”, you picture soldiers handing out sweets, aid, stability, schools, and the slow work of building legitimacy.

But notice what has already happened. The labels do not simply describe violence; they sort it. They place it into moral categories before you have seen it clearly. A car bomb is a terror attack. A raid is an operation. A fighter is a militant or a soldier depending on who names him. Some acts are framed as retaliation or response, others appear without context at all. The judgement is built into the language, and it shapes what you are able to see.

So when you hear that people “support terrorism”, what do you think that means? Fanaticism? Cruelty? A disregard for human life? Or is the word doing more work than you realise, applied selectively, stretching in some places and narrowing in others?

Now change your perspective.

You are in Derry during The Troubles, or in Baghdad during the Iraq War, or in Batang Kali during the Malayan Emergency, or southern Lebanon, or parts of Gaza where the sky itself can feel like a threat. The conflict does not arrive as headlines or new bulletins. It does not interrupt your day. It is your day.

Soldiers on the street, or drones overhead. Stops and searches, or checkpoints that divide neighbourhoods and families. Raids and detentions, or the sudden violence of an airstrike. The uncertainty of whether a routine moment will escalate. The quiet calculations, where to stand, when to speak, whether to move at all. The sense that your safety depends not on rules, but on the judgement of someone you cannot question, and who might well hate you. You are told that this is the price of stability. It does not feel like stability. It feels like oppression.

From your sofa, violence appears episodic. A bombing, a strike, a response. From the street, power is continuous. It is not something that happens. It is something you move through.

And even the story of cause and effect shifts depending on where you sit. Some forms of violence are consistently introduced as responses, retaliation for something that came before. Others arrive as if from nowhere, stripped of history, presented as eruptions of hatred or fanaticism. Entire populations are flattened into caricature, irrational, violent, incapable of politics. Armed groups are reduced to “proxies”, extensions of some distant power, their local origins, grievances, and aims quietly removed. You may recognise their names, but not know how they emerged, what they claim to represent, or why they endure.

So when Western audiences ask, often with genuine confusion, why anyone would support those they call terrorists, what is missing?

Take the Provisional IRA. For many in Britain, the conflict was defined by bombs, by attacks on soldiers, by sudden, shocking violence. That is what reached the sofa. But for many in places like Derry or West Belfast, the defining experience was different: the daily presence of soldiers, raids, detentions, and the constant pressure of a system imposed on their lives. The same conflict looked different depending on where you stood.

Support, in that context, was not always ideological, and rarely a simple endorsement of violence. It was shaped by what you saw and what you lived with.

That difference matters. The person on the sofa may treat the worst actions of their country’s soldiers as excesses, regrettable but not representative. The person on the street may make a similar distinction about insurgents, seeing reckless or indiscriminate attacks as wrong without abandoning the broader cause. In both cases, support is not a blank cheque. It is filtered through experience, loyalty, and constraint.

And in that sense, support for insurgents often mirrors something more familiar. “Supporting the troops” does not mean endorsing every action taken by someone in uniform. It means aligning with the force that claims to protect you. For someone living under occupation or sustained external control, support for those labelled terrorists can function in much the same way. Not as a pure endorsement of violence, but as a reflection of where the pressure is felt, and where resistance appears possible.

This is what the language of officialdom tends to conceal. “Shock and awe” is the use of overwhelming force to dominate and disorient, to make resistance feel futile from the outset. “Hearts and minds” is not its softer counterpart but its continuation by other means, a system that makes it costly to resist and risky even to be seen as sympathetic to resistance. It is a carrot and stick approach, where cooperation is rewarded and non-compliance brings pressure, suspicion, or force. Fear sits at its centre.

Neither “shock and awe” nor “hearts and minds” removes violence. They organise it. The terms soften what they’re describing. They disguise its true nature and redirect attention away from it. They suggest that force is precise, controlled, and directed only at those who deserve it, that harm falls on the guilty while everyone else is being protected. But for those inside the system, that distinction does not hold. Force is not experienced as selective. It is ambient, uneven, and often terrifying.

So the question changes. Not “why would anyone support terrorism?”, asked from a distance that already assumes the answer. But what does that support actually mean when the violence that defines your world is not the attack, but the system that precedes it and surrounds it?

From inside the system, an IRA bomb that kills civilians when it detonated early and killed civilians is not experienced as morally distinct, in any meaningful way, from a soldier firing into a crowd during events like Bloody Sunday or Ballymurphy. Both were forms of violence imposed on civilians within a wider system of conflict. Both would be excused, denied, explained, justified, or minimised by those who identify with the actors responsible. From a distance, the distinction between insurgency and counter-insurgency holds. Up close, they look pretty similar.

Precisely because the term “terrorism” is used unevenly, it matters when it clearly applies. When violence targets civilians as the message itself, when fear is not a by-product but the point, something different is happening. The staged executions carried out by ISIS are not simply acts of violence. They are performances built around civilian vulnerability. They are designed to communicate through fear. That should be named plainly. But the existence of terrorism does not simplify the wider landscape. When the term is applied selectively, when some forms of violence are made vivid and others are absorbed into the background, it begins to shape perception rather than clarify it. From the sofa, insurgent violence is the story. From the street, the system is the story.

And that is why this is so difficult to understand when sitting on your sofa. Western audiences are not uniquely blind. But they are looking at a picture that has already been arranged for them. They see spikes of violence and are told that is the whole. They do not see the structure in which those spikes occur, or they are taught to interpret it differently.

So they ask, why would anyone support terrorism?

Turn the image around, and the question changes. What does this world look like from within it? What does “terrorism” mean when it is not the only violence you see, but one part of a system you live inside?

And what would you become, if you lived there?