What is terrorism? "Terrorism is just violence you don’t like"

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2005/May/opinion_May13.xml§ion=opinion&col=

Why media shouldn’t take sides in the ‘war on terror’

WHAT is terrorism? Who is a terrorist? A definition is hopeless, says Professor Richard Rubenstein of the Centre for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. "Terrorism is just violence you don’t like". The lack of agreed definition means no one really knows how to fight the war against terrorism — apart from demonising Muslims and introducing anti-terrorist laws that steadily erode our hard won civil liberties and lead to imprisonment of innocent people.

Instead, governments, in hand with the media, concentrate on scaring the daylights out of us with stories of terrorist cells in our urban midst, terrorist poison plots and ‘dirty’ atomic bombs. There is also a lot of ignorance about Al Qaeda.

After listening to a Professor of Islamic Studies lecture to an Australian think tank about terrorism, I asked him, "What exactly is Al Qaeda?". He thought for a while and replied, "a franchise operation". I agree. The idea that Al Qaeda is a global organisation with coordinated global aims and branches everywhere is ludicrous.

Even the Western media has moved away from this view but it still talks about ‘terrorist’ organisations having ‘links to Al Qaeda’ without ever telling us what those links are. Phil Rees, a documentary filmmaker has spent a lot of his career doing stories on terrorists, or, as he would prefer to call them, militants.

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[coloradodem2005]

1. There you go.

Right on the nose.

[bennywhale]

2. One mans freedom fighter is

another mans terrorist.

Look at the IRA. Blowing up innocent people in Britain but recieving substantial support in parts of America.

Always been the same.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

3. I wonder if the British viewed the American Patriots

as terrorist during the revolution. Like the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

[KG]

4. dead americans are 'victims of terrorism', dead iraqis and afghanis are

'collateral damage'.

'...violence you don’t like' indeed.