Re: Don\'t Be Such a Drama Queen
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I can only imagine snowballs classification of the US dropping the bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki. That must be the greatest act of terrorism known to mankind.
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One of them, but that's another discussion that has been had many times here.
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This is where i like to make the dinstinction between acts by a government and acts by an independent terrorist organization whose goal is to commit acts of terrorism. Acts of war by one country against another is not "terrorism" as is discussed today. Its an act of war. It can be responded to by a similar act of war by the country effected. That doesn't make it any more or less terrible.
When a independent group, such as al qaeda or hizbollah or kahane chai attacks innocent civillians and then retreats back into the community, that act is better defined as "terrorism" as is understood today.
If syria attacked israel tomorrow and launched missiles into jerusalem and tel aviv, i would NOT consider that "terrorism." It would merely be an act of war.
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You've made this point before; that you think terrorism relates to whether or not the actors are state actors or not. You can have that defintion if you want, but I don;t share it, it seems redundant when you can simply talk about states and non-state actors, and I think the vast majority of people see terrorism as something along the lines of the use of violence against civilians to terrorise them for the furtherance of political goals.
However, if you do see terrorism as simply about the state/non-state status of the actors, you shouldn't be using it pejoratively/condeming people for being "terrorists" merely according to your definition. It makes no sense to say that an attack by a "terrorist" non-state group on say military invaders is worse than an attack by state forces on civilians simply becasue one isn;t a state actor. There are obviously numerous times when non-state actors' violence is legitimate (eg Warsaw resistance) and state actors' violence is completely illegitimate (eg Nazis).
At any rate, if you don;t want to label civilian targetting atrocities by stae actors terrorism, they can be called war crimes instead. I would say they are both state terrorism and war crimes.
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