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Comment by happyscrappy | Hacker News Reader

They are terrorizing local populations for a political goal. They are not just fighting battles they are slaughtering civilians into compliance. How is that not terrorism?

Edit: He also claimed that it would be better if ISIS was in charge of the area. That is quite ridiculous.

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By that definition, ANY fighting would be terrorism. Was the Vietnam war terrorism? We definitely terrified some members of the local population. Were the actions by Japan or Germany in WWII terrorism?

By some definitions of terrorism, all of the above would count as terrorism. At that point, the term seems to be pretty useless.

Germany, Japan, the UK and the US (among others) all did things in WWII that count as terrorism, and no, the term isn't useless. The textbook definition, "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims" is exactly what was happening in the war, although I would add the caveat that it's violence and intimidation against civilians. Using violence and intimidation against enemy troops is just regular warfare.

So beheading Lee Rigby on the streets of the UK was regular warfare?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lee_Rigby

I think the attackers used that exact defense during legal proceedings.

I agree with them tbh. but that means they should have been shot on the spot instead of arrested.

I don't mean I agree with their cause but I am surprised attacks on service men & women don't happen more on their home soil which, from one perspective, is behind enemy lines.

When most people say "terrorism", they are referring to a very specific thing, not "warfare and violence in general". You've made the word useless, just so that you can use it's connotations where they don't belong. Connotations which wouldn't exist if it was really defined that way.

I don't know where you got that textbook definition, but it sounds useless to me. What violence and intimidation is not done in the pursuit of political aims, aside from low-level street crime? Even adding the qualifier against civilians doesn't seem to help much, as civilians not being deliberately targeted is very much the exception in warfare historically.

My definition is "Violence and intimidation, conducted by an organization not directly under the control of a national government, targeted deliberately at civilians, for a political purpose". Much of what is popularly referred to as terrorism is closer to guerrilla warfare.

I don't entirely agree with the linked post above, but I would also not call ISIS a terrorist organization. They may be major-league assholes who need to be dealt with somehow, but they're more of a statelet attempting to practice regular warfare, including controlling a specific territory, establishing their own political system, etc.

> Violence and intimidation, conducted by an organization not directly under the control of a national government, targeted deliberately at civilians, for a political purpose

I kinda like this as this separates attacks by these militants on military bases as "guerrilla warfare".

But what do you call when the attack is "targeted" at an armed force but with complete disregard to high number of civilian casualties? Examples: 1) Bombing a marketplace or mosque or any public place just because their might be SOME people or the opposing force there (apparently a lot of suicide bombings use this justification) 2) Missile strike on a UN school just because u suspect there are some members of the opposing forces hiding there (israel vs Hammas) 3) Drone strikes on villages to eradicate militants (with considerably high civilian casualties). (we all know who does this)

I think that the name of the tactic is dependant on the intent of the attack, rather than the results. This does admittedly get dicey at times.

If the intent of the attack is direct attrition against an enemy force and supporting infrastructure, then it's guerilla warfare, even if most of the victims are civilians due to poor planning, bad information, etc. This may get particularly tricky in the case of suicide bombings in Israel - since virtually the entire country is part of the reserves, you could make the argument that any attack is an attack against the military infrastructure. I'd say that for it to be legitimate guerilla warfare, there must be at least a vaguely plausible plan for success. In the case of suicide bombings in Israel, they would then have to have a plan of killing the entire population of the country as a way of ending the fight, and their tactics would have to be a plausible way to carry that out. I don't think it fits that definition, so that would make it terrorism.

2 and 3 are ordinary warfare IMO, because they are both done by states and have the intent of attacking enemy forces. They may or may not be done with flimsy information, and the state in question and the militant group they are fighting against may both be in violation of assorted laws of war under various legal systems, but it's still conventional warfare.

The only difference between your definition and that of the parent is that you explicitly deny the existence of state terrorism, and I don't think that is an improvement.

I think we would all be better off separating terrorism (a tactic) from identity (organization/state). Then we could categorize militant groups as whatever you want: state, statelet, militia, guerrilla force, freedom fighters, caliphate, NGO or whatever and separately discuss their tactics with respect to whether they commit acts of terrorism.

By my definition, violence carried out by the state is not terrorism because it's a different tactic.

The message sent by terrorist actions is that your state is illegitimate because it cannot protect you from our tiny little group. It makes no sense for the state to send this message to its own citizens - it's goal is the opposite, by definition. If a state is directly trying to send the message to citizens of a foreign state that their state can't protect them from you, that's ordinary warfare.

If "terrorism" is to retain some specificity, I don't think you can include very old-fashioned war crimes in it. Slaughtering civilians during an attack or pillaging cities after a victory are millennia old types of atrocities, and I'm not sure they need to be recategorized under a neologism.

Aren't you making a mistake in assuming that those who fall under this neologism are different? Isis for example wants to be a nation, not just terrorize people. Haven't there been religious crusades of terror for that purpose in the past?

I've never heard anyone describe Hitler as a terrorist. Not the Soviets either. Even the US during the cold war terrorized their own population (only the communist part of it, but I'm sure IS is fine with the local population as long as it adheres to the IS ideology)

I think in order to be a terrorist, terror has to be your main political tool.

History, my brother, check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

Terrorism is the use of mass terror against a civilian population you don't control to reach a political goal. Terrorizing a population is simply oppression and governments have been doing this for as long as there has been governments (Nazis, Soviets, Chinese Communists, etc. are all modern examples of this.)

Like the threat of a nuclear bomb? Not just NK but Fat Man too.

By that definition Russia is a giant terrorist organization, seeing as they're pointing nuclear missiles at a lot of cities in North America and Europe.

Well I won't rule on the general statement about Russia but their nuclear arsenal isn't being used to change any of our stated policies. They're not saying "stop doing X or we will use nuclear weapons". What most or all current nuclear armed nations have done is basically used their nukes to maintain the status quo -- a Nash equilibrium of non-usage.

Russia invaded Crimea some months ago. Only a nuclear power could have done that without retaliation.

Yes. That's my point. Most of us live under terrorist regimes. Black people are terrorized by the police. The middle east is terrorized by the US. We're terrorized by Russia.

To isolate a few and to give them the label of "terrorist" for being a bit more terrifying is a form of brainwashing.

Irrelevant to the question at hand. ISIS may or may not be a terrorist organization depending on how you define it, but arguing the "may not" side is not "defend[ing] ISIS."

Would you define US drone strikes as attempts at terrorizing the target populations?

Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants. ISIS slaughter wantonly. Some people have a world view that needs to see the US and ISIS as equivalently evil.

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/

"Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

ISIS seems to have a similarly broad definition. No, they're not morally equivalent, but we have serious issues with how we prosecute the War on Terror.

Wow, that's exactly what Judith Butler is talking about when she talks about which lives are grievable and which are not[1].

[1] https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_16/review...

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

How do you know? What downsides are there to targeting non-combatants? And how do you define non-combatants. Person in the field with a stick in their hand, is that a combatant? A wedding, is it a combatant gathering.

If anything it actaully helps to target civilians because it promotes creating and perpetuating more resentment, which in turn provides more opportunities to do drone strikes, make more drones, repair more drones, get promotions based on drone operations, etc.

> Drone strikes explicitly try not to hit non-combatants.

IIRC Laura Poitros's talk at the CCC a few days alluded to the fact that targets on drone "kill lists" have values assigned to them -- denoting specifically the acceptable threshold of non-combatant collateral damage.

Let me chime in here as I am the original commenter.

I did not say that it would be better if ISIS was in charge of the area.

I did say that a three state solution would be an improvement to the way that state boundaries are drawn in the Middle East - they were drawn the way they are now specifically to keep the area unstable by the British as a result of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. This is a sentiment also expressed by many nations in the UN and by scholars who study stability in the Middle East.

Regarding their 'slaughter of civilians into compliance' I would point out that as this is war, in fact the most violent geographic location today, that the cost of innocent civilians is a historical certainty (completely 'typical' even in its horrendousness) and that there is no side that is innocent of such things including the United States and our contractors, allies and the militant extremist (anti-ISIS) factions that we fund, support and arm there - and that also our lauded drone program institutionalizes compliance with slaughter of innocents. Again this is not to say "Go ISIS!" or "Boo America" - it's to say "Boo war!".

If you'd like to ask for more details, supporting media coverage, or clarification about any of my comments including this one please feel free to ask(/challenge).

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