Terrorism
I get into a number of conversations on terrorism with people holding a variety of different opinions. Common opinions that are more accepting of terrorism are 1.) that people have no choice and when backed into the wall they can respond with what tools are available to them. 2.) they justify it based on previous actions by democratic nations, such as the U.S. bombing hiroshima and nagasaki. 3.) they have a semantic disagreement and believe that terrorism is not properly defined and would apply to any attack that results in civilian casualities. 4.) more rare, but people believe that all civilians in a nation count as valid targets. I especially here this belief when applied to Israel, normally justified because of mandatory military service which they take to mean all citizens are valid targets because they will be or have been drafted to serve in a military role.
As to the first belief, that terrorism is the tool of the weak. I believe this could not be further from the truth. Terrorism has most often been used by those in power to keep control. Whether it is placing the ‘trouble-makers’ up on a cross, their head on a pike, burning them at the stake, or killing whole families of the people who were in power before-the tool is used to squash rebellion, not bring about real social change. If terrorism was only the tool of last resort, why then has it been used most commonly by those already in power?
To the second belief, all peoples have done something of which they could be ashamed of in their past. Society grows and advances, as does our idealogy of human rights and law. Would being in a developing country excuse rape or murder because they don’t have the same standard of law that we do in democratic states? There are activities that we engage in today that will eventually be viewed as wrong, maybe not necessarily legally but definately socially. It may be as simple as how we greet one another, or how we handle disagreements. We cannot use the justification that because we have behaved criminally in the past other people can also behave criminally. If a convict is harmed he deserves as much justice as the rest of the nation.
For the third belief, that terrorism is not properly defined and therefore would include collatoral damage as in a bombing raid-there is some measure of truth to this. The task of defining terrorism as an internationally accept standard for law has been a difficult one. Personally, I am of the mind that terrorism is any action that is meant to force some form of change upon a civilian population by real bodily injury and threat of bodily injury upon that population. Collatoral damage and harm to civilians is definately offensive to anyones sense of humanity, and should be a criminal offense at an international level, I merely believe that it should fall under a seperate category. Terrorism should be considered the direct targeting of civilians. I am more than happy to criminalize behavior that puts civilians at inappropriate risk, as would be carpet bombing a city to get at a handful of people-just not defined under terrorism. Another semantics argument I rarely get into is that terrorism includes any form of pressure or distress, and some people go so far as to include that into threat of prison. As a common usage of the term terrorism that may be appropriate, however the importance is in defining an actual international definition of terrorism for a criminal offense. There are many cases where a legal definition does not match a social convention. The definition of insanity as a mental disorder is rarely even included in modern dictionaries now, as it has become a purely legal term.
4.) The argument that ex military personal or possibly one day will become military personal are valid targets is rediculous. It would be similar to killing whole families of a ruling class to prevent them from ever again claiming power. It is more similar to the U.S. imprisioning people with genetic predispositions to some criminal activities. Laws are not retroactive in our country for a similar reason, we cannot criminalize a behavior and go after people who engaged in that activity in the past. We also imploy a statute of limitations on many forms of criminal activities, for at least one reason-that the purpose of law is to protect society now. In war time it is not appropriate to target people who may have once been a threat. Would it be fair for us to target Bathists(sp?) merely because they used to be a threat and serve with Saddam in Iraq? Someone must be a threat now to qualify as a target in wartime. I would personally like the evidence of the threat to be valid enough to stand up in a court of law if it were possible to take them into custody, however this often could not be possible, yet the idea should still stand. Civilians are no more valid targets, even if they used to serve in the military or may soon serve in the military-then would any random person on the street. The road that belief leads down follows the beliefs of some of the greatest evils of the world, including racism,genocide and eugenics.
