Still Slippery
The New York Times' ombudsman attempts a definition of "terrorist," to distinguish when it should be applied.
As Praktike points out, after the first glance wears off, the definition quickly runs into problems.
Right. I wonder, too, how Okrent would describe the Sept. 11 hijacking of Flight 77 and its subsequent plunge into the Pentagon. Was the Pentagon a legitimate military target for the Islamists, in his view? Many people would say it was. But what about the plane-load of civilians? The "purely" in his definition seems to rule in the WTC attacks as terrorism, and rule out the Pentagon attack. Yet dozens of civilians were deliberately slaughtered in both.
And it's hard to say what Flight 93 was, under Okrent's rule, since we don't know for sure if its target was a legitimate military one or not. If it's true that the 9/11 hijackers who attacked Washington had a laundry list of targets, including military and non-military ones, what were those men? Terrorists? Does "terrorist" come down to "what you can manage to put in the crosshairs?"
While some Israelis and their supporters assert that any Palestinian holding a gun is a terrorist, there can be neither factual nor moral certainty that he is. But if the same man fires into a crowd of civilians, he has committed an act of terror, and he is a terrorist. My own definition is simple: an act of political violence committed against purely civilian targets is terrorism; attacks on military targets are not. The deadly October 2000 assault on the American destroyer Cole or the devastating suicide bomb that killed 18 American soldiers and 4 Iraqis in Mosul last December may have been heinous, but these were acts of war, not terrorism. Beheading construction workers in Iraq and bombing a market in Jerusalem are terrorism pure and simple.
As Praktike points out, after the first glance wears off, the definition quickly runs into problems.
[T]he attacks on the Cole were carried out by the same types of people and by the same organization that have shown no compunction in killing civilians--though they do issue elaborate justifications for such things. Still, it's hard to view the agents here as anything other than "terrorists," no?
Right. I wonder, too, how Okrent would describe the Sept. 11 hijacking of Flight 77 and its subsequent plunge into the Pentagon. Was the Pentagon a legitimate military target for the Islamists, in his view? Many people would say it was. But what about the plane-load of civilians? The "purely" in his definition seems to rule in the WTC attacks as terrorism, and rule out the Pentagon attack. Yet dozens of civilians were deliberately slaughtered in both.
And it's hard to say what Flight 93 was, under Okrent's rule, since we don't know for sure if its target was a legitimate military one or not. If it's true that the 9/11 hijackers who attacked Washington had a laundry list of targets, including military and non-military ones, what were those men? Terrorists? Does "terrorist" come down to "what you can manage to put in the crosshairs?"
