Terrorism Is a Problem, but So Are Anti-Terrorism Laws

Prevailing anti-terrorism discourse is unproductive, demonizing terrorists to the point of framing them as non-human, and obscuring their motivations by casting them as thinly-veiled nihilism.

by Dina Yehia

Originally, this article was going to be a critique of Egypt’s anti-terrorism laws as compared to international standards set by the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC). But as I began working on it, I felt uninspired. The list of reasons for my lack of inspiration is long but unoriginal. Counter-terrorism laws are terrible. The standard…