RE: [A-List] Defining 'terrorism' is harder than you'd think

["Craven, Jim" <JCraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with MacDonald on this point. First of all, most people define
"terrorism" as calculated or foreseeable violence against
"non-combatants" and "innocents" in a given war or armed action. First
of all, the definition of violence: Many equate violence with direct
armed action (shooting, landmines, bombing, chemical/biological,
torture, etc) but do not see occupation itself, independent of the force
required to maintain and expand the occupation by foreign powers intent
on exterminating an Indigenous population, as a form of violence. In
that context, even children of the occupying powers, being groomed as
future occupiers, are no longer innocents or non-combatants--the moral
responsibility for any harm coming to the children of occupiers rests
with the occupiers who placed their own children in the position of
being exposed to "collateral damage" or being seen as future occupiers
by the occupied resisting their occupation. The same applies to many who
do not see sanctions and embargos as forms of calculated violence highly
likely to serious affect those nominally designated as "non-combatants"
and "innocents." The "violence" of those resisting occupation cannot be
equated with the violence of the occupiers just as the "violence" of the
Warsaw Ghetto Jew cannot be equated with the violence of the nazi
occupier. The definition of violence and the differentiation between
just and unjust or progressive versus reactionary violence rests on who
is dioing the violence and for what purposes and with what
intentions/interests. 

Next, the problem of defining who are really the non-combatants and
innocents. If one defines the act of unjust and illegal occupation as a
form of unjust violence, and if one assumes that future generations need
to be available and groomed to continue and unjust occupation, then the
scope and definitions of who are and are not non-combatants and
innocents change. Anyone who is part of an unjust or illegal occupation
(whether foreign or native to the area) becomes a combatant and
non-innocent regardless of the subjective intentions, level of awareness
and reasons for participation of some of those nominally seen as
non-combatants or innocents. Occupied peoples have always regarded
native collaborators as combatants and non-innocents and have always
dealt with them in the same fashion as they have dealt with foreign
occupiers being assisted by the native collaborators; this is nothing
new from prior to and during the American Revolution onward.

Jim Craven