Defining Terrorism

[Mark Kohut]

A good article, thanks. And leans more toward Joseph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism

On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 5:28 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> By Phillip Cryan
>
> "Terrorism" may be the most important, powerful word in the world right now.
> In the name of doing away with terrorism, the United States is bombing
> Afghanistan and talking about possible attacks elsewhere. Political leaders
> from many countries are at once declaring support for the new U.S. war and
> seeking to re-name their own enemies as "terrorists."
>
>
> http://www2.hawaii.edu/~pine/Phil110/terrorism.html
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 5:26 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> My apologies if this has been posted to the list before.
>>
>> What is terrorism? Few words have so insidiously worked their way into our
>> everyday vocabulary. Like `Internet' -- another grossly over-used term that
>> has similarly become an indispensable part of the argot of the late
>> twentieth century -- most people have a vague idea or impression of what
>> terrorism is, but lack a more precise, concrete and truly explanatory
>> definition of the word. This imprecision has been abetted partly by the
>> modern media, whose efforts to communicate an often complex and convoluted
>> message in the briefest amount of airtime or print space possible have led
>> to the promiscuous labelling of a range of violent acts as `terrorism'. Pick
>> up a newspaper or turn on the television and -- even within the same
>> broadcast or on the same page -- one can find such disparate acts as the
>> bombing of a building, the assassination of a head of state, the massacre of
>> civilians by a military unit, the poisoning of produce on supermarket
>> shelves or the deliberate contamination of over-the-counter medication in a
>> chemist's shop all described as incidents of terrorism. Indeed, virtually
>> any especially abhorrent act of violence that is perceived as directed
>> against society -- whether it involves the activities of anti-government
>> dissidents or governments themselves, organized crime syndicates or common
>> criminals, rioting mobs or persons engaged in militant protest, individual
>> psychotics or lone extortionists -- is often labelled `terrorism'.
>>
>>     Dictionary definitions are of little help. The pre-eminent authority
>> on the English language, the much-venerated Oxford English Dictionary,
>>
>>
>> https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-terrorism.html
>
>
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