The Trouble With the US Definition of Terror
Gwynne Dyer; 6/5/08
“Terrorism,” like “fascism,” is one of those words that people routinely apply to almost any behavior they disapprove of. We had a particularly impressive spread of meanings on display last week. At one extreme, the US State Department released its annual “Country Reports on Terrorism,” a congressionally mandated survey of all the incidents that the United States officially regards as terrorism. There were, it said, 14,499 such attacks last year. (That’s 71 down from the previous year, so there is hope.) At the other extreme, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and current nemesis, when asked to justify his earlier remark that the 9/11 attacks on the United States were “America’s chickens coming home to roost,” helpfully explained that the US had dropped atomic bombs on Japan and “supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans,” so what did Americans expect?
See: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=109622&d=6&m=5&y=2008