Some of you may be following the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah after a border raid. Upon reading and listening to extensive coverage of this, I was disturbed by wanton use of the word 'terrorism' in almost all media outlets. Here is an example from the Chicago Tribune that is representative of the kind of language I'm talking about
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Quote:
When terrorists raided Israeli territory and kidnapped an Israeli Army soldier a few weeks ago, they had a ready explanation. They wanted a prisoner exchange with Israel. As usual in these attacks, the terrorists also could recite an elaborate provenance of Israeli provocation, sometimes tracing back years if not decades.
But the brazen kidnapping of Israeli soldiers--one by Palestinian terrorists a few weeks ago and two more on Wednesday, by Hezbollah terrorists from Lebanon--can't be disguised as part of any historical pattern of attack and revenge.
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(Link:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o...l=chi-news-hed)
To be precise, attacking a military convoy and kidnapping soldiers of a state army may rightly be called all sorts of vile things, but it is not 'terrorism' in any meaningful sense. Neither do those Lebanese who choose to fight back against the Israelis inside their own homeland merit the 'terrorist' label merely because they are not wearing Lebanese uniforms. The general conflation of the word with the ideas of "insurgent" and "guerrilla" further obfuscates the issue.
I'd like this thread to be a serious attempt at refining our definition of 'terrorism' and examining the ways in which it is used in media today. There are those who claim that the word itself is useless, but I believe that 1) it describes particular real phenomena that bear identification and exploration and 2) the word is here to stay, so we are better off engaging it than rejecting it outright.
I would also like to hear from those who genuinely disagree that uses such as the one quoted above are inconsistent or incorrect.
One thing I feel we can agree on at the outset is that a man is a terrorist based on what he
does, not what he
is.
Here are a few elements that I think belong in our definition:
- Deliberate targeting of civilians.
- Extra-normal violence. (Easier said than defined.)
- Violence as a 'message' or an indirect means to ultimate ends. By this I mean that, for example, the real targets of a bomb that kills a tiny fraction of a civilian population are the survivors who live to see it.
One last theme is association. What degree of association with people who commit terrorist acts makes one a terrorist through complicity? If an organization is 'terrorist', does that mean all of its members are terrorists, even those who have not been involved in terrorist acts even from a distance?