Reply #44: Why?

[Darranar]

I can call US actions in Iraq, clapping one's hands, and me breathing blushfaknikandiankaidnism, but my strange definition simply muddles language....

The only difference is that in one case I am making up a word on the spot, and in the other you are taking a controversial term and assigning it a definition to suit your purposes.

Without consistency of application such terms become pointless. If I claim that "murder" is the deliberate killing of innocents when done by the US, I eliminate its purpose in common debate. I can't say that because what the US is doing in Iraq is murder, the Iraqi resistance is better than the US, because the Iraqi resistance may be committing morally equivalent actions that were murder but are no longer, because I redefined the term. Similarly, if Israel were to commit equivalent crimes as Hamas (leaving aside questions of whether they do), perhaps by indiscriminantly bombing the Occupied Territories and killing a dozen innocent Palestinians, while your definition of terrorism doesn't apply (because Israel is not Palestinian, Iraqi, or Chechnyan), the act is morally equivalent to terrorism and, had it been done by Chechnyans, Iraqis, or Palestinians, your definition would classify it as terrorism.

Look at it in another way. Your definition of terrorism consists of two parts:

1. Being Palestinian, Iraqi, or Chechnyan.
2. Committing actions that you would consider terrorism when done by the above groups.

Unless you are bigoted I do not think that you would say that (1) is a crime or morally wrong. Therefore, considering terrorism to be as you define it, what is wrong about terrorism - why it is immoral and should be opposed - is wholly in (2). Therefore, when Israel, or the US, or any other nation, commits (2), they are, from a moral perspective, committing an equivalent crime as the Palestinians. In order, then, to show that the Israeli government is more moral than the Palestinians, it would be beside to point to claim that they are not committing terrorism, because, according to your definition, that is inherently true. Rather, you would have to show that they are not committing (2). So, in essence, in logically arguing that Israel is indeed "in the right", including the term "terrorism" (again, by your definition) would be pointless unless matched by an equivalent term on the Israeli side (which you would have to show does not exist, or exists in a significantly lesser amount).

Anyway, the term "terrorism" has no indicator of its specific appliance to certain groups of people. It is not like, for example, anti-Semitism, which means specifically racism against Jews because it was coined that way and has been used that way since.