Of terrorists vs freedom fighters....

What Do You Mean, 'Terrorist'?

Jessica Stern, a lecturer on terrorism at Harvard and author of "The Ultimate Terrorists" (Harvard University, 1999), said there are clear political differences between how the civilized world handles an Arafat and a bin Laden, noting: "Arafat is an elected leader of what we hope will soon be a state." But she rejects the notion that terrorists can ever be "freedom fighters."

"To me, the definition of terrorism is deliberately targeting non-combatants with the aim of instilling fear," she said. "I don't think it's useful to focus on the perpetrator, because then it just becomes an epithet. It's a technique that can be used by nonstate actors, as well as states. I believe that when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, terrorizing the Japanese population was a very deliberate strategy."

SO what about Israeli reprisals that kill innocent Palestinian civilians? With rare exceptions, like Iraq, the United States government's official definitions of terrorist entities focus on organizations and individuals, not governments. Israel, as American officials often note, is a democracy accountable to the norms of international law. The practical effect is that only the Palestinians, who lack a state, are generally labeled terrorists.

Ms. Stern said a particularly unsettling aspect of the recent wave of suicide bombings in Israel is that they have not fit the more typical pattern of young, single men, usually poor, with little hope, but have included a bright young woman with, theoretically, everything to live for. "It's hard to say that these Palestinian bombers even have political objectives," she said. "It's almost nihilistic. It's almost a kind of epidemic, a cult of death that comes out of a sense of cultural humiliation."

The assertion that Arafat is an elected official aside (because I don't recall the election, and I never hear of any opposition to him within the Palestinian movement), it's interesting to see the journalist who wrote the article pretty much ignore what Stern said.You can see that where she states that terrorists deliberately target non-combatants in order to instill terror ("The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize." - Lenin). The writer then asks the rhetorical "So what about Israeli reprisals that kill innocent Palestinian civilians?"

The difference is subtle but essential. Israel does not target civilians, they aim at military targets. Without a doubt, civilians are killed (the classic and tragic illustration of "collateral damage"). They are not, however, the specific target. Unlike, say, someone blowing up a Seder dinner.