"Terrorism" implies that a group exists to cause fear.
Wikileaks releases secret documents produced by the government of United States (et al).
If Wikileaks is a terrorist organization, then secret documents produced by the government of the United States must cause fear.
Is that really what King intends to say?
So his point is that to put anyone on the terrorist watch list, that person needs to be qualified as a terrorist, obviously. But the term 'terrorist' doesn't have a fixed, unambiguous meaning; it can mean many things to many people in different context (ergo that phrase 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'). So if one were to use the definition from the INA, which he is arguing is just a good a definition as any others, Wikileaks (or its members/representatives) would qualify and as such be put on the watch list, which would then cause a whole bunch of other things.
Note also that this definition of terrorism far outdates the post-9/11 terrorism scare, so it can't be blamed out overzealous Homeland Security stuff or anything.
So nice try, but no cigar.
Pretty sure being on a plane while it's hijacked would be a fearful event.
I think it's still safe to call anyone that hijacks an airplane a terrorist.
I'm not quite sure what point you're arguing; what I was saying that the GP defined terrorism as something that requires a motive of instilling fear; i.e. a goal of the acts that the terrorists is to make people afraid. That's one definition but the INA defines it differently, which is just another definition.
If you define all acts of highjacking as terrorism, you explicitly do away with the requirement of fear. And for good reason, because otherwise one would have to start proving state of mind, which is a legal snake pit.
But if you restrict yourself to people with the intention to cause fear to discern a terrorist, you can't call anyone that hijacks an airplane a terrorist, because your definition requires a different criterion, namely the objective of the highjacking.
To conclude, "it's still safe to call anyone that hijacks an airplane a terrorist." is meaningless because it's said in a vacuum, without a definition of who is a terrorist. This whole discussion is about the distinction between to definitions, and that under one definition some people are terrorists and under another they aren't.
(I'm not taking a position, I don't know and I don't care, definition problems are boring; the fact that the OP failed to recognize this nuance, and effectively turned his argument into a straw man, is what bothers me.)
It used to mean that, but now it's just a buzzword that refers to people who don't agree with you.
It works like "racist":
- you belong to an ethnic group
- you go to a job interview
- you get rejected
- you will call the employers racist and blame your rejection on racism to blur that fact that it was your flaw
In our context a terrorist is a person who does something that is embarrassing to the media or the government.
Absolutely; they represent a threat to his power, and so he'll use whatever tools he has at his disposal to disadvantage them in that fight. If they're a terrorist organization, it becomes illegal to give them monetary support, which they obviously need.
It's much simpler than the definition of the word 'terrorist'.