Terrorism by any other name

Sunday October 26 2014

Terrorism.  The word has taken on a new status since 911, coming to mean acts of violence against targets in the Western world.  But not all acts of violence, just those committed by individuals or groups claiming to be Muslim.

To illustrate the distinction: 
Killing a soldier standing on guard at Canada’s National War Memorial is terrorism.
Killing three high students in a high school cafeteria is not terrorism.

And the distinction is significant.  No one seems to object to spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to fight terrorism, yet there would be an outcry and heated public debate if anyone proposed spending that kind of money on school safety. 

There is another important thing to know about terrorism: 
It can never be committed by us.  When we undertake actions designed to protect our way of life against threat, these acts are described as defence, as in “We need to defend ourselves now before evidence of the threat shows up in the form of a mushroom cloud.”  This argument gives  permission to bomb large urban areas, inevitably killing thousands of innocent children and women, and to celebrate the act with large public and media displays.
Terrorism is always committed by others.  They can’t fool us by claiming to use violence as a means of protecting their way of life. They are terrorists.  If they kill one individual in a barbaric manner and post a grainy video online, they are portrayed as beasts without conscience. 

The lesson here is that terrorism is not simply an act, it is an act committed by someone else against us.

And on a similar note, news outlets are reporting today that ISIL captives are being tortured, that they are being waterboarded.  Can these be the same newsrooms which most loudly rejected the ‘torture’ label when the same tactic was used in Guantanamo?  

Killing innocents or torturing human beings is wrong, no matter the excuse.  If you condone the deed, you own the consequences.