Who's a terrorist?

Generally the Arab people treat their women pretty badly. I’m not saying that that’s right. What I am saying is that if you want to have a strong argument, don’t include charges that you aren’t sure if they are true or not, especially since there is a wealth of information you know to be true. For instance, the Saudis, among others, don’t allow their women to drive, and the Taliban don’t mind stoning the occasional woman for sin, so say either of those, but don’t say that they stone women for applying for driver’s licenses, because when the audience discovers that you are being dishonest about that, they will stop listening to you.

Kind of like that thing about the only thing the enemy understands is force. That’s all all we understand too. We talk to the enemy for awhile and when we don’t get it we use force. Force is all anybody understands, so when you use that weak argument people think that you aren’t a deep thinker.

Well what is a terrorist anyway? Can we construct a general definition, like say the definition of the word ‘rock?’ Or is it more like ‘I know it when I see it?’ And I think that a terrorist is seen as a bad guy, so we are going to tend to want to describe our enemies that way more than our friends.

Was the tea party a terrorist act? Well maybe no, because I don’t think anybody got killed. Say we killed some British soldiers in the execution of the act, guys who weren’t doing anything bad at the time, just guarding the ships? I still say it’s not. One, because it was an act of revolution, and at the time the perps could have had a reasonable belief that a revolution could succeed. Two, because even though the British soldiers weren’t doing anything in particular they were British soldiers. Attacking enemy soldiers is also an act of revolution, whereas killing civilians is not.

So those are my two rules for a terrorist, acting in a lost cause, and attacking non-combatants. And one more thing, I think if a legitimate government does it, it is not terrorism. That doesn’t make it right, but at least if a country does it, the victim has a target to avenge himself on, as opposed to some shadowy organization.

So where does that leave me? Is the PLO okay then because they have a kind of a war going on and maybe they could reasonably expect to win the goal of driving Israel out of the west bank, and right now they rule a territory, so they are like a nation? Hezbollah has some kind of political goal as far as Shia vs Shiite, but they are also kind of an army for hire. Al Qaeda, or whatever calls itself Al Qaeda these days, seems purely terrorist. They kill almost exclusively civilians, and don’t seem to have any realizable goals.

I don’t know if this is really getting anywhere. Maybe terrorism is just one of those things that you know it when you see it.

But then you get to the situation where my freedom fighters are your terrorists and vice versa, so that we could both say that we are fighting terrorism and mean quite different things. But then it seems that there are some terrorists that are nobody’s freedom fighters, like these car bombers in Iraq, what the hell are they accomplishing?