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What is terrorism – a personal definition. – politicalbetting.com
What is terrorism – a personal definition. – politicalbetting.com
The Oxford Reference dictionary defines terrorism as:
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I think the definition you have here is a legal definition rather than a dictionary definition. The latter should draw on the etymology -- reflecting on the terror aspect. The former can rightly be framed in the way you suggest.
Of course, the distinction is not unusual: "murder" has a dictionary definition (in common usage it would include many cases of manslaughter) which is broader than the legal definition.
And therein lies a slight difficulty. Language is something that a skilled communicator (such as an orator) can use to provoke/inspire/etc -- and part of that often involves stretching definitions to make an emotional appeal. The word "terrorist" is always going to be subject to some elasticity in its definition in the hands of a politician or other persuader.
There's a second, bigger difficulty though... reflecting on your WWII example, what about cases where the end justifies the means? Your definition would include a Polish resistance fighter who didn't take enough care to protect German civilians. I don't want to catch them in the same definition as al-Qaeda...
...but the hard cases make bad law (or less-than-perfect legal definitions, perhaps)
"any specific targeting of civilians either with the intent of doing them harm ..." - I punch another civilian in a bar when he insults my girlfriend. He is a civilian, I am specifically targeting him and I intend to do him harm. Am I a terrorist, or just a drunken thug? I'd suggest the latter, not the former.
I think any definition of terrorism needs to incorporate the ideas of inducing wider terror (hence the "terror") and it being a political act (hence the "-ism"). An act of violence can, in my view, be an atrocity, if it targets civilians, but not terrorism if isn't aimed at inspiring panic.
If avoided needing to discuss where to draw the line, enabled a fast trial based on the facts (they were caught literally red-handed), and the judge had the ability to send the perpetrators down for life anyway.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vMm5HfxNXY4 - Warning, he uses a few F-words.
Basically, it started with the hollowing out of the middle class and the offshoring of manufacturing with little social safety net, not helped by initiatives aimed at helping “minorities” which completely bypass poor white people, and there’s millions of Americans for whom the dream isn’t working, who can no longer afford housing for a family on a working man’s salary, if they can even find the work in the first place.
Since 2020, things have got even worse for this group, many of whom lost their jobs during the pandemic, see 7m illegal immigrants now depressing unskilled and semi-skilled wages further, an opioid epidemic literally killing people in these communities, and a government which comes across as being happy to spend money in Ukraine and Israel, but not on fixing the problems in their own communities or responding to their own disasters.
There’s some recent polling that suggests black support for Trump is actually increasing (slightly, and from a very low base), as his various legal difficulties resonate with the way that the ‘justice’ system comes after them.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/23/natwest-staff-gloated-over-farage-debanking/
NatWest staff gloated about the closure of Nigel Farage’s bank accounts and suggested they had “single-handedly driven him out of the country”, The Telegraph can reveal.
Workers reacted to news that the former Ukip leader had been debanked by NatWest subsidiary Coutts by saying: “Hope that knocked him down a peg or 2.”
Internal messages handed over to Mr Farage by NatWest also show that staff suggested he had “dodgy Russian connections”, and was involved in fraud. Another described him as “sketchy”.
Staff also referred to him as a “crackpot” and an “awful human being”, while one said: “The money I’d have paid to have been the agent ringing him to tell him [that he had been debanked].”
Mr Farage described the comments as “vile” and called on NatWest to reconsider the £11.3 million payout its board is expected to approve this Thursday for Dame Alison Rose, who resigned as chief executive of the bank in July following revelations in The Telegraph about Mr Farage’s treatment.
Why not call them what they are?
Besides, plenty of people are distracting from the horror of what is happening. I don't see the people so keen to dismiss beheaded Israeli babies spreading details the Israeli government came out yesterday, even as they try to blame Israel for the hospital car park incident.
One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. It was always thus. We may well be appalled that around the world, including our own country, there are people who regard Hamas as freedom fighters, but we have to accept reality. Their reasons vary from the appalling anti-semitism of Islamism to sympathy for the oppressed.
It isn't really worth getting bogged down with definitions, they do not really progress any resolution.
Terrorism: interpretation.
(1)In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where—
(a) the action falls within subsection (2),
(b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government [F1or an international governmental organisation] or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and
(c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious [F2, racial] or ideological cause.
(2) Action falls within this subsection if it—
(a) involves serious violence against a person,
(b) involves serious damage to property,
(c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action,
(d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or
(e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.
(3)The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.
(4)In this section—
(a) “action” includes action outside the United Kingdom,
(b) a reference to any person or to property is a reference to any person, or to property, wherever situated,
(c) a reference to the public includes a reference to the public of a country other than the United Kingdom, and
(d) “the government” means the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.
I think that this does capture the key elements required; The use of serious force to cause substantial harm for a designated purpose.
A further complication in the Israel situation is that their response has been to declare war against the Palestinian state in Gaza. If you regard Hamas as state actors that you can declare war against are they terrorists?
Russia wasn't at war with Ukraine on Feb 24th 2022 either.
https://www.thecricketer.com/Topics/mens-world-cup-2023-premium/icc_review_future_world_cup_format.html
I'm just relieved they haven't considered making the World Cup another Blundred tournament.
Actually, that's another issue with such definitions: how do proxy actors fit into above definitions? Was the shootdown of MH17 by Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass, using a loaned Russian SAM system, a terrorist act, or the result of a mistake during an act of war?
Avanti West Coast: Union hits out at Christmas rail service cuts
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-67192282
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/23/turkey-submits-bill-to-ratify-sweden-nato-membership
There is loads of serious shit for R4 to cover and there are Radio 1 and 2 where they can waste their listeners time on such nonsense. The final straw was nearly last week with Nick Robinson creaming himself about Man Utd and Eric Cantona as they did vital coverage of Eric Cantona being a singer now.
It’s becoming as moronic as morning TV.
All recommendations, apart from Radio 5, welcome.
Obviously from reports there were fatalities in that age range so no idea why they weren't included in an official tally issued over 2 weeks after the atrocities were carried out.
BTW I am not trying to deny babies weren't killed but curious at the reason for them not being listed.
Point is that the word is capable of many definitions.
Legally, different jurisdictions have different legal definitions of terrorism (if they have it at all).
In the sphere of ordinary language, it is yet more confused. Richard's definition is as good as any; better than most, but it's anything but universal.
Few on here would hesitate to call Hamas's recent atrocities terrorism - but what, for example, of Bush's 'war on terrorism' ?
We are surrounded by news. I have a sneaky suspicion that it’s not healthy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism
...Various legal systems and government agencies use different definitions of terrorism, and governments have been reluctant to formulate an agreed-upon a legally binding definition. Difficulties arise from the fact that the term has become politically and emotionally charged. A simple definition proposed to the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) by terrorism studies scholar Alex P. Schmid in 1992, based on the already internationally accepted definition of war crimes, as "peacetime equivalents of war crimes", was not accepted..
It’s more complicated than that. Mass shootings by disturbed individuals with extreme right wing views in the US are described in terms of mental illness. Mass shootings by disturbed individuals with Islamist views are called terrorism, because “terrorist” evokes the other.
As said upthread, atrocities committed speak for themselves. We shouldn’t need a label of “terrorist” to condemn the Hamas attacks, or the Madrid train bombings, or the Tokyo underground nerve gas attack, or the murder of Lee Rigby, etc. If labels are there for rhetoric and are getting in the way of understanding, then leave them in the mouths of politicians, but analysts can drop them. Yet there is also some phenomenon that links the IRA, ETA, the Red Brigades, some commonality that warrants research.
We can see where the GOP has gone and continues to go. Once handed power they will - like the Nazis - never hand it back. They will - like the nazis - promote a fictionalised ideal whilst oppressing and surppressing all who disagree or do not fit the mould. And like the nazis, they will end democracy and blame it for all the ills of the past.
Trump isn't a fascist like the GOP. He isn't interested in banning women from having access to contraception or abortion or travel. He isn't anti-foreigner. He just wants to be the Biggest Thing Ever. So as a convicted mobster he has found himself the talisman which will dismantle the old America and bring about the new righteous America.
This new world will consume him, canonising his virtues as a saint whilst burying and ignoring his massive sins. The irony doesn't matter - the criminal womanising demoagogue as figurehead of their pseudo Old Testament "Christian" nation.
Good news for Michael Moore who gets some smashing documentary content. Bad News for the world. We've already seen that Trump and the GOP would have given in to Putin (whilst making idle threats they don't mean about nuclear defence against him). Would likely have told Netanyahu to wipe Gaza off the map and had the good old boys run up a number 6 against any American muslim they could find. Whilst baiting China to take Taiwan so that he can stoke anti-chink hatred at home.
This is the world which awaits us.
Getting distributed medical and other systems to report data to a central system, with anything approaching reliability, takes time.
Hence Murder Tuesday. Which managed to surprise Robert Peston for months.
I don’t watch tv news and duck in and out of the newspaper websites, here, other news sites through the day but want to be able whilst waking up and getting the day going to be able to listen to someone intelligent interview, say the head of MI6, about the issue of the day and not have some absolute shit about music crammed in (it’s different if a major star has died of course) or other nonsense.
That does not mean you can't pick a side morally, however, where the word can be used as shorthand for acts we as a society with our values disagree with and this is where the furore over the Beeb kicks in.
£1bn fund to expand EV charging network still not open after three years
Rishi Sunak unveiled funding pot for expanding charging facilities at motorway services in 2020 but it is not yet accepting bids
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/24/1bn-fund-to-expand-ev-charging-network-still-not-open-after-three-years
The truth is that you cannot adopt a universal definition and apply it universally. The Terrorist / Freedom Fighter / Soldier boundary is flexible depending on your perspective.
Nor can an international community apply its definitions and rules absolutely. The world doesn't work like that, there is always interpretation and context.
Personally I maintain that there is a huge difference in intent between invading a town and then cold-bloodedly shooting little girls and in calling for the civilians to leave a town so that you can bomb out the terrorists and then little girls being killed in the attack when it comes.
But in practice? Two dead girls, both of whom were of equal value and equal innocence.
If a Tory is speaking, you know it is a lie. They can't run for reelection on their record because they haven't actually done anything.
Better than anything else although I do love a bit of Nick Ferrari.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/october2023
the workforce survey is one of the prime drivers for interest rate changes.
So they are going to experiment with a new one based on claimant and HMRC RTI information which means it won't be picking up self employment at all.
Our railways have a rather good track record with safety, with only one fatal crash involving passengers since Grayrigg in 2007.
But it's often a close-run thing. Below is a long report into an incident in Derbyshire, where a mis-wired signal led to the wrong aspect (colour) to be shown. Thanks to the signalmen and drivers of both trains involved, there was no collision. But it was a close-run thing.
Very nearly shades of Clapham Junction...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/653688e1e839fd0014867377/R112023_231023_South_Wingfield.pdf
And yet we can also treat terrorism more leniently. The Good Friday Agreement released terrorists (albeit it called them paramilitaries) from prison early, while those who had murdered for more personal reasons stayed inside.
I suppose the next question must be: Is terrorism ever justified?
In the cases of the French Resistance, the Polish Underground and, as your photo implies, the ANC, I'm sure many would say yes. In an asymmetric war, terrorism may be the only avenue of resistance remaining to the weaker side.
Plus as your post suggests, we can also decide not to use the word terrorism in a pejorative sense.
But perhaps the better TFTD this morning was the all too short (and should have been done by a science editor) interview with Carlos Frenk, physics professor at Durham, on shifts in understanding cosmology. As Frenk is a practising Catholic perhaps he should have a regular gig on TFTD.
All kinds of judgment questions there, but as a general approach it felt about right.
If you listen on the internet you can pick up some of their overnight programmes when you wake in the morning
If they were there'd be hundreds of thousands or millions of dead Gazans.
Israel is following the rules of proportionality in trying to go after Hamas, while trying to minimise civilian casualties. Its difficult as Hamas use civilians as human shields, it ties one hand behind their back, but its also the civilised way to behave so we should be congratulating them for being so civilised in the face of such horror.
FFS you really have no clue about me.
However, Stalin's persecutions of political opponents in Russia in the 1930s does amount to state terrorism, because it was clearly done to maximise terror in the population, with show trials of the more notable given maximum publicity. Of course few of the victims actually got that much airtime, but the intent was clear. This was, therefore, terrorism as well as a set of atrocities.
But arguing about the greatest crimes of the last century as an academic exercise on semantics can get distasteful so I'll stop.
I genuinely enjoyed the article but in WWII the British Bomber Command adopted area bombing and "dehoming" was a specific aim of this.
In early/mid WWII bomb accuracy was measured in miles. They could not accurately bomb small targets. But attacking the ground with bombs was more feasible than, say, invading France, so they had to work out what to do. So they tried to work out what would be the most efficient use of British bombers and after some debate area bombing and dehousing was adopted instead of, say, logistics bombing to attack railways/hubs or developing a longer-distance bomber to attack ships
Since this policy was specifically designed to target civilians and no realistic means available to reduce civilian casualties, it meets your definition of terrorism.
Details of the dehousing policy can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehousing . If you have a taste for military history you might want to try Bomber Command by Max Hastings, which is in turn inspiring thru his depiction of how to ramp up production from ten to thousand bomber raids, and deeply depressing in his depiction of the casualties thus produced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehousing
https://archive.org/details/bombercommand0000hast
You'd rather minimise any attacks on Israel and magnify any Israeli response to keep up the pretension that Israel is the "bad guy" here.
You have more contempt for moderate Labour than for the Tories.
A former Labour leader was a two time election loser is better than a probable Labour election winner in your eyes.
Have I got any of that wrong, or is it in the general ballpark?
Kristallnacht, and the persecution of Jews were very public acts; their mass murder was an extension of that (though perhaps, for them, 'plausibly deniable').
I have absolutely no doubt that, in modern terms, the area bombings of WW2 by all sides would be defined as war crimes - the equivalent of state enacted terrorism.
"If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.."
"Virtue" being whatever those in charge of the mob say it is.
More to the point, it was some of these actions which were legally acceptable at the time which led to the creation of the laws covering actions in war after WW2.
Nonetheless, it is striking that since the by-elections last week we have seen a run of four successive polls, all by different polling companies, all of which put SNP GE support at 2% across GB. To put that in context, across October 2022 the SNP support was averaging exactly 4% across all polling companies, and even in June/July this year it was typically 3% and sometimes edging up to 4%..
In times of perceived existential crisis a very great deal of behaviour is "acceptable". The alternative is to follow the "rules" and cease to exist.
If people had sat down in 1906 or 1926 and pondered, say, firebombing, the Allied Powers might very well have deemed it illegal. But it was used in times of perceived existential crisis.
There are few eternal rules and precious few in times of war.
Either way though, Israel are definitely not bombing indiscriminately, are they? Even the discredited Hamas-supplied Gazan death figures which tried to claim 500 deaths from a fictional "Israeli" bombing haven't claimed that hundreds of thousands are dying from indiscriminate bombing - which would be the case if it were actually happening in an area as densely populated as Gaza.
Terrorism tends to be carried out by non state actors because it is a form of asymmetrical warfare that tends to be carried out by the weaker partner in the conflict. The stronger partner has other means at their disposal. Israeli attacks on Gaza are therefore not terrorism. Similarly, the bombing of Hamburg or Hiroshima are not terrorism. Whether they are war crimes is a different issue.
Whether any of these things are right or wrong is a third question altogether, and one I'm always surprised at how many people feel themselves qualified to answer. In many conflicts it's hard to divide the two sides into good guys and bad guys. Rather than seeking elusive moral clarity we should focus our efforts on helping both sides to de-escalate and find a lasting peace that removes the underlying causes of the conflict.
I would have thought that the gold standard approach would be to continue with both sets of figures in parallel for a year or two, so that they can do some proper analysis of why they are getting different numbers from different places.
Measuring workforce labour rates without reference to self employment seems nuts, especially because as I understand it, self employment is often the result of times of particular churn in the labour market (people get made redundant/take voluntary redundancy and go and work self employed rather than take another job).
Rather than seeking elusive "de-escalation" in those situations, we should be seeking to aid victory for our allies who are good over those who would do them harm and in victory they can maybe have a lasting peace.
Lewis Carroll — 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less"
I hope that helps.
Good people sometimes do bad things.
And I see terrorism and war crimes as equivalent acts, requiring similar condemnation and punishment but which, due to the aplicatio of law against states, require slightly different approaches in how they are prosecuted.
Its the same in Norniron. The reason why the DUP refuse to govern is because the DUP have lost. And the longer they refuse the bigger the coming defeat when the frit UK government forces an election. At least we have the opportunity to vote out the SNP in Scotland.
MarkHertling
@MarkHertling
·
8h
All wars are horrific. Some more intense than others.
The conditions of this battlefield is the worst I’ve ever seen. The things we will likely see in the days & weeks ahead will assault all our senses.
It is the worst of the human condition. 6/
There are no quick or easy solutions, as both sides are aggrieved.
A few more hostages will be released, but that’s part of a playbook to provide hope when hope isn’t there.
Thousands of innocents caught in the middle will suffer & is little that can be done to avoid it. 7/
There will be an IDF incursion. Hamas will prove better than many expect in repelling the IDF advance.
Unfortunately, I also believe the fight will last a long time, will result in thousands of casualties, and neither side will achieve their strategic objectives. 8/
https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1716607287278649448