Monday, July 24, 2006

Terrorism Is...

I heard George Mitchell, the former Mideast Envoy, on a PBS show called 'Now' where he unintentionally provided the reason for his failure in the Middle East when he said:

"Terrorism is a tactic, not the enemy"

While he claimed that Al Qaeda was an example of a real terrorist group, Mitchell claimed that some of those who use terrorism actually have a clear, coherent political goal.

He didn't bother to go ahead and say that those in the Middle East who use terrorism tend to have among their political goals the destruction of the State of Israel.

An oversight, no doubt.

Just out of curiousity I googled the phrase "Terrorism is a tactic, not a" These are some of the results:
  • Terrorism is a tactic, not a movement.

  • Terrorism is a tactic, not a label.

  • terrorism is a tactic, not a set of goals, not a political or religious movement, nor an identifiable group of people or states.

  • Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief.

  • Terrorism is a tactic, not a foe.

  • Terrorism is a tactic, not a coherent force.

  • Terrorism is a tactic, not a strategy, goal or cause.
Once you push terrorism off to the side as a tactic, totally independent of the people who are using it, you can conveniently minimize the murder of innocent victims and make it possible to lump together those who use it with those who don't--the host of the show sympathetically asked Mitchell what to make of the Middle East where you have groups at each other's throats killing each other, lumping Israel and Hizbollah together.

Maybe Diana West is right when she suggests:
I have long argued that the "war on terror" is an amorphous term -- sacrificing clarity for fuzzy political correctness. What if we, as a nation, belatedly declared war on specific jihadist groups -- al Qaeda and Hezbollah and other organizations dedicated to our destruction? This would have the tonic effect of clarifying not only our enemies' identity, but our own.

We can't fight if we don't know who we're fighting. We can't win if we don't know who we are.
So, who is Hizbollah--other than Israel's enemy and the terrorist group that has blown up hundreds of Americans?

Take a look at Little Green Footballs who has pictures of the kinds of shrapnel that Hizbollah is putting into their rockets and has pictures of some of the results.

Then take a look at the pictures he has of pro-Hizbollah rallies:
in New York City
in Moscow
in Montreal
in Sydney
in Los Angeles
in Chicago
in London

The relativism of these protestors is exceeded only by their hate.
And the stakes are very high

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4 comments:

Yitzchak Goodman said...

The general political goal of terrorism is the achievement of totalitarian power.
The terrorist groups confronting Israel went from being Marxist to being Islamist.

Daled Amos said...

Agreed.

In that case, terrorism cannot be distinguished from the enemy--as George Mitchell puts it--since the tactic itself is a reflection of who the enemy is and what his goals are. Besides, such violent and ruthless tactics tend to inform and shape the enemy himself.

Anonymous said...

"terrorism is a tactic" comes from the Army War College, my unschooled friends.
Anybody can use it, including those in the very founding of Israel.

To aggregate all terrorists is to engage the fallacy of composition.

If you cannot think your way out of a paper bag.... then what will be the result of your fighting?

Shooting is also a tactic. Do you want to have a war againt Shooters?

And yes, humans are shaped by the tools they use. Be it "terrorism" or war.

Daled Amos said...

I agree that those involved in the founding of Israel used it--but they can speak for themselves in differentiating between themselves on the one hand and Hizbollah and Hamas on the other: see LEHI Members Refute Comparison To Hamas

True shooting is a tactic, but there have been general protocols established on the parameters of war--and the tactics of Hizbollah reveal a different kind of opponent than the tactics of the IDF, especially in terms of the value of a human life.