Don't Provoke Tigers
by Eric Margolis
CALGARY -- This week's arrest of six Canadians of Tamil origin on terrorism charges reminds me of Sir Peter Ustinov's brilliant maxim: "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."
In an apparent rush to U.S. President George Bush's ideology and policies, the Harper government recently added Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers guerillas to its terrorism list. The U.S. added the group last year.
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Terrorism is generally defined as "attacks on civilians for political purposes." Mad dogs who blow up airliners, trains and schools are terrorists, no question. But under this definition, then what do we call the Allied mass slaughter of civilians in Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
Or Russia's massacre of 100,000 Muslim Chechens a decade ago; Israel's 1982 bombardment of Beirut that killed 18,000 civilians; U.S. destruction in 1991 of Iraq's water treatment plants, creating an epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands of children?
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http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0827-24.htm