How do you define Terrorism?

[Tyreds Tale]

I've read about every important leader call some other leader or group terrorists, with the namecalling going back and forth:
-Iran calls US terrorists
-Palestinian Jihadists call Israel terrorists
-Venezueala and Cuba call Bush the greatest terrorist
-Osama calls West terrorists
-Americans call Al-Qaeda terrorists
-Coalition calls insurgents terrorists
-Sunnis call shiite radicals terrorists
-Shiites call sunni radicals terrorists
...and on and on...

so I'm think maybe the defintion of the word has been lost. Either that or we are all terrorists in some relative way, which makes the term meaningless.

[Tyreds Tale]

I got these mostly from this UN site:
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/terrorism_definitions.html
Hey, Im trying to be objective here.

No matter how you define terrorism, it seems difficult to put "the West, Israel, US, or Bush" into those definitions.

[sogrgirl]

i voted for the idiosyncratic answer, lumping religious/idealogical reasons in with idiosyncrasy (kind of a stretch perhaps.)... personally, I think all of them except "peacetime equivalent of war crime" are what I consider to be the definition of terrorism.

[Vanquish]

The British called the IRA "terrorists".

While the USA considered the IRA to be "freedom fighters" and even harboured them from prosecution and extradition to the UK.

Even though the British were in Northen Ireland in a Peace Keeping role to defend Catholic communities from an organized Protestant "army". The USA still felt it appropriate to defend the IRAs interests.

Similar to the Iraq Invasion, the people of Northern Ireland welcomed the British Troops with open arms for saving them from ceratin slaughter. Within 6 weeks they were throwing petrol bombs at the British troops. That's gratitude, lol.

My take on this is, if the IRA were "Freedom Fighters", then so is the "Insurgency" in Iraq. I would prefer to describe the Iraqi Insurgency as a "Levy en Masse", a perfectly legal role in war.

However "insurgency" is a better word (at least for Washington) as those Iraqis have no rights under the Geneva Convention.

Some might even argue that the "Insurgency" are simply volunteer "Minute Men", but that's another angle.

You decide!

[sogrgirl]

insurgents - freedom fighters -- whatever you want to call them, they are killing INNOCENT people on the streets, THAT makes them TERRORISTS in my mind and invalidates sympathy for their cause.

there are alternative methods that can be employed by any revolutionary group that don't need to include murder of fellow human beings.

[Vanquish]

It's a shame that the largest contibutors to NORAID (IRA's "Charity") did not think the same way as you do.

In case you are wondering who the largest contributors to the IRA was (pre 9/11), it was the American public!

In fact, special laws passed in New York to protect IRA Terrorists living in the USA, are the same laws that hindered investigations into the people responsible for the Twin Towers attack.

What a bizzare twist!:lmao:

[LongShot]

I voted
"anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violence for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons "

although a few of them essentially mean the same thing.