Reply #5: Unreliable rockets

[PATRICK]

not well aimed at military targets by a recognized state military force are pretty close to any narrow definition of terrorism. Regular armies in war used rockets specifically for their terror effects rather than their poor accuracy and killing effect. By their noise and wild reach they are more terror than death dealing unless really sophisticated in targeting and focused on destroying an objective.

I wouldn't make too big a deal about Carter caught badly finessing a point. I would if he were the actual president. Spreading the concept of terror is an extreme danger in accomplishing the very gaol of the activity and using it politically for the supposed righteous state's own terror ends and labeling dissenters for its own advantage. The debate has so degraded that ground rules must be firmly established each time and then get to the roots of the problem not the methods and propaganda used by states or groups or even individuals to effect those roots to their own advantage or way of thinking. In the larger definition we are all terrorists- and eventually get treated as such by our own noble government until terror itself is absolutely triumphant in effect, a common means to an end by all sides for whom the vast human majority is mere fodder. The current debased political judgment by institutional "guardians" makes terror and even the terrorists completely victorious and self-affirmed.

The narrow view of the real problem is that an occupied or oppressed people with not even the means to make full war responds with the means available to them to the degree of their just cause and desperation. And the equivalence against their enemies in deaths and loss of liberty is pretty close in their experience. MOST people in the area, even those emotionally supporting the relatively few acts, like decent people everywhere neither choose to do terrorism nor expect it to work even if appears to by the wrong response of the attacked states who themselves are "in the terror game"- and by the experience of the oppressed peoples are the only ones who mainly profit from the horrors.