zlacker

Terrorism is anti civillian warfare. Planting sabatoge devices that kill and maim innocent people is actually terrorism/ Is it just not as effective because it maims more than it it kills? I don't get it with these pedantic aruments.

eg lets say we load a bunch of shrapnel into a tree so it maims or permanenly injures whoever the next logger is...tha is basically the same thing as lobbing hand grenades into the public square. the attacks are meant to target random people, caught unawares, in a way that conveys a persistant threat of continued, scalable future action.

Now lets take some other shady randome violence like the KGB assinating a civilian in London with radioactive isotopes in his tea. Is that terrorism? No, its a specific threat carried out in a limited capacity against a designated target. It might be criminal or a war crime or wahatever bad thing describes it, but its not "anti civilian warfare", in the same way that not all war casualties are "war crimes" in the normal usage.

>>001sky+(OP)
Yes, the murder of Litvinenko is considered state terrorism by those who can afford to say so. Its not considered random at all. They very publicly killed someone who was an outspoken opponent of theirs. KGB has a long history of both state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism.

> THE senior British official was unequivocal. The murder of the former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko was "undeniably state-sponsored terrorism on Moscow's part. That is the view at the highest levels of the British government".

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article6...

You might think that some forms of terrorism are worse than others, but that doesn't mean that those are the only forms of terrorism.

>>gozo+22
I do appreciate your point and the quote shows its not just yourself arguing the other side of the case. But every act of violence or intimidation is not "an act of terrorism". For god's sake what would you call the USA police vs Black Unarmed people? I mean if that is not worse and more akin instilling intimidation into people I don't know what is.

>>001sky+R3
The problem with declaring the police as terrorist is that they also have legitimate use and the aren't necessarily directly politically motivated. That said, I could see how someone could claim that the crackdown of the civil rights movement in the US in the 60s could be considered a form of state terrorism. A more obvious example would be something like South Africa under apartheid.

This is of course a slightly academic use of the word. Many people have a hard time seeing even traditional domestic terrorism (like the unabomber) as terrorism.