Defining terrorism - MI?

[Skybird]

Terrorism? What's That?
The U.N. has a deeply dangerous definitional problem.

By Claudia Rosett


Among the many reasons to beware the United Nations as a vehicle for peace in Israel, Lebanon, or any other part of the globe now threatened by Islamic terrorists, there is one item so obvious that in the current debate over “ceasefires” and Security Council resolutions it has almost entirely escaped notice. Quite simply, while terrorism may be the defining security threat of our time, the U.N. has failed — literally — to define it.

If that sounds like a minor semantic lapse, far removed from the bloody conflict in Israel and Lebanon, it is anything but. The free world faces a war in which victory — if one may be allowed such a blunt word these days — starts with understanding the real nature and tactics of our enemies. So, with top U.N. officials calling for instant peace that would effectively equate “both sides” in the war launched out of Lebanon last month by Hezbollah against Israel, I e-mailed the U.N. Secretary-General’s office recently to ask: Does the U.N. consider Hezbollah a terrorist group?

Back from one of Kofi Annan’s spokesmen came the answer: “The designation of ‘terrorist’ would require a definition of what terrorism entails.”

Let us note that in the case of Hezbollah, the group has entailed enough atrocities to have earned it the nickname, “the A-Team of Terrorism,” even before Hezbollah on July 12 launched its killing-kidnapping-and- rocket-firing assault on Israel. Hezbollah’s prior record entails well over two decades of kidnappings, hijackings, suicide bombings, massacres, and collateral carnage worldwide, in countries including Lebanon, Israel, Spain, Denmark, Germany, France, and Argentina. Created by the totalitarian ayatollahs of Iran just after their 1979 Islamic revolution; trained and bankrolled by Iran; supported by Syria; seasoned in extortion and smuggling operations reaching as far as South America, Canada, and the U.S.; open to alliances with other terrorist groups; peddling terrorist propaganda internationally on its Al-Manar TV station; dedicated to the destruction of Israel and seeking ultimately to supplant the workings of free societies with its Iran-spawned creed and practice of terror… Hezbollah among its butcheries to date has murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group except al Qaeda.

But because the United Nations has not defined “terrorism,” the U.N. does not regard Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

The U.N. does, of course, have a stack of “counter-terrorism” resolutions, and bestrides a dozen or so “international counter-terrorism conventions.” But without a clear definition of what terrorism entails, U.N. member states — including the liveliest terror sponsors — pay no penalty for interpreting these measures in any warped way they might choose, or effectively ignoring them altogether. The result is that even the U.N. resolutions passed a few years ago sanctioning a highly abbreviated list of a few hundred Taliban and al Qaeda affiliates worldwide have been at best erratically enforced. Back in late 2003, a group of terrorism experts employed by the U.N. to monitor member-states’ compliance with these sanctions became bold enough to report publicly and in detail some of the gross delinquencies of specific nations. The U.N. dissolved the group of experts, and replaced it with one more easily muffled.

A former member of the now-defunct, outspoken U.N. counterterrorism-monitoring group, Victor Comras, explained to me in a phone interview last week that achieving a serious international definition of terrorism is a “huge issue.” Once an objective criterion for terrorism exists, said Comras, “At least you have the foundation for asking that concrete actions be taken.”

Without that definition, as Comras wrote this past March, “countries remain free to define for themselves which groups are terrorists and which are ‘freedom fighters.’” Comras observed that “Saudi Arabia uses this distinction, for example, to get away with funding Hamas, while Iran and Syria use it to provide funds and support to Hezbollah.” Beyond that, he noted, “Many other countries have also used it to avoid taking steps to freeze funds or take other civil or criminal action against those individuals or groups which they support.”

The U.N. failure on this score is no accident. It is a direct result of what the U.N. is, and how it works — a collective, saddled with procedures that tend to favor despots over democrats. In the matter of coming up with a global definition of terrorism, the job falls to the General Assembly’s legal committee — the so-called Sixth Committee— which includes all 192 member states, and operates in practice by consensus. In that setting, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) — whose 57 members include such terror-linked states as Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran — has for years insisted that any definition of terrorism exempt the OIC’s pet terrorists. These the OIC would prefer to define — notes Comras — as “engaged in so-called ‘struggles against colonial domination and foreign occupation.’”

At the same time, the OIC and assorted “unaligned” states have been demanding that regular armed forces of sovereign states, already subject to other international rules of engagement, be subject to U.N. rules concerning terrorism. That would clear the way to officially invert reality to the extent that by U.N. lights, Islamic terrorists would qualify as liberators, and democratic states trying to defend themselves could be treated as terrorists.

Wisely, the U.S. and some of our allies have refused to sign on to this Big Brother universe (though on some issues, such as the affable view of Palestinian terrorism, and chronic condemnations of democratic Israel, the U.N. seems to dwell there already). Under pressure from the U.S. last year, Kofi Annan departed from U.N. habit long enough to propose a genuine definition of terrorism — only to have it shot down by the U.N. committee-consensus process. And there the matter sits. While terrorism looms ever larger as an Islamic-fascist tactic and threat to the free world — which the U.N. was originally meant to protect — the task of defining terrorism remains bottled up in the U.N. legal committee.

This gridlock goes far to explain why Annan, apparently forgetting his reform pitch of last year, has been calling with the regularity of a cuckoo clock for an immediate “ceasefire” in the current conflict. In doing so, he ignores the desperately lopsided setup of any deal in which Israel would be constrained by U.N. words on paper while the terrorists — by definition, if only the U.N. had one — can be reliably stopped only at gunpoint. That asymmetry is pretty much the arrangement that incubated this war in the first place. Israel complied with U.N. rules and withdrew six years ago from Lebanon. Hezbollah violated the rules, expanding its protection rackets and stockpiling illicit weapons under the terror-neutral gaze of U.N. “peacekeepers,” until it was ready to strike.

The gap in the U.N. lexicon also helps explain why, when Annan’s deputy-secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown sat down for an interview last week with the Financial Times, he felt free to deliver the Orwellian line: “It is not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism.”

Wallowing instead in the jargon of peace in our time, Malloch Brown went on to suggest that for Israel’s attackers, Hezbollah, there must concessions, and eventually “a settlement which addresses the political issues of their cause as well as the military ones.” These bland words mask the terrorist nitty-gritty that Hezbollah’s “cause” includes the takeover of Lebanon and the extinction of Israel. Musing that Hezbollah does have its wayward aspects, and in its rocket assaults on Israel “is making no effort to hit military targets; it’s just a broadside against civilian targets,” Malloch Brown arrived at the I’m-O.K.-You’re-O.K. conclusion that “It’s all very challenging.”

And as the Bush administration has increasingly turned to the United Nations in this crisis, the U.N. fog has been seeping into America’s political discourse. Instead of talking about killing, capturing, and defeating the terrorists of Hezbollah, or moving immediately to hold to account Hezbollah’s backers in Baathist Damascus and nuclear-bomb-building Teheran, our own political leaders are now maneuvering via the U.N. for a “cessation of hostilities.”

This has produced a peculiar delicacy of phrase even from President Bush. The U.S. government, with good reason, includes Hezbollah in its list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” But in a press conference Monday, Bush skirted this category, instead labeling Hezbollah “a political party with a militia that is armed by foreign nations.” Sorry, but Hezbollah is not at core a political party. It is an Iranian-Syrian-backed terrorist militia with a Lebanese political front.

There is a deeply dangerous reluctance in the democratic world to face up to the extent of the war already declared and being waged against us — manifest in terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Bombay, and beyond, and especially against Israel, which is fighting right now on the front lines. These terrorists, and their sponsors, watch and learn from each other. In the battles ahead, if the U.S. takes its cues from a U.N. unable even to define terrorism, let alone defy it, the result will be that terrorists — protected by their patrons at the U.N. itself — will continue in graphic and ruinous terms to define it for us.

http://article.nationalreview.com/pr...c1NTE2ODQ4YzQ=

[scandium]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Let us note that in the case of Hezbollah, the group has entailed enough atrocities to have earned it the nickname, “the A-Team of Terrorism,” even before Hezbollah on July 12 launched its killing-kidnapping-and- rocket-firing assault on Israel. Hezbollah’s prior record entails well over two decades of kidnappings, hijackings, suicide bombings, massacres, and collateral carnage worldwide, in countries including Lebanon, Israel, Spain, Denmark, Germany, France, and Argentina. Created by the totalitarian ayatollahs of Iran just after their 1979 Islamic revolution; trained and bankrolled by Iran; supported by Syria; seasoned in extortion and smuggling operations reaching as far as South America, Canada, and the U.S.; open to alliances with other terrorist groups; peddling terrorist propaganda internationally on its Al-Manar TV station; dedicated to the destruction of Israel and seeking ultimately to supplant the workings of free societies with its Iran-spawned creed and practice of terror… Hezbollah among its butcheries to date has murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group except al Qaeda.

That, like the entire article, is a very nice one dimensional view of things. Here's a bit from "Terror in the name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill", by Jessica Stern, to add a little more perspective:

Avigdor Eskin, like Yoel Lerner, is a follower of the teachings of Rabbi Kahane. Kahane's teachings remain a strong influence on Jewish extremists long after a Muslim extremist assassinated the rabbi in New York City in 1990. To followers of Kahane, redemption is inevitable, now that God has helped create the modern state of Israel. But it is up to the Jews to reestablish a theocracy, and to remove any obstacles that stand in the way, including the Arabs.

..

Kach and Kahane Chai were declared terrorist organizations in 1994 by the Israeli cabinet. The banning of the two groups followed one of the most well-known incidents of Jewish extremism, namely the massacre of twenty-nine Muslims in Hebron by Dr. Baruch Goldstein on February 25, 1994. Goldstein, a thirty-seven-year-old doctor and father of seven at the time of the shooting, was a prominent member of Kach. The group had issued statements supporting Goldstein's attack.

Both Kach and Kahane Chai organize protests against the Israeli government and harass and threaten Palestinians in Hebron and the West Bank. Groups affiliated with them have threatened to attack Arabs, Palestinians, and Israeli government officials. They claimed responsibility for several attacks of West Bank Palestinians in which four persons were killed and two were wounded in 1993. In April 2002, the current leader of Kach, Baruch Marzel, was arrested by Israeli police in connection with a plot to leave a trailer laden with two barrels of gasoline and two gas balloons outside a Palestinian girls' school in East Jerusalem. The West settlements of Tapuah and Kiryat Arba are strongholds of the Kahnist movement. According to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, both organizations receive support from American and European sympathizers.

I ask Erzion to explain his feeling of urgency about rebuilding the Temple. "If you seek the kernel of meaning in the Temple," he says, "it is akin to the meeting of love between the Jewish people and God, or the attraction between men and women. The Jewish people are the female aspect, and they are missing their other, an other which can only be recovered when the Temple is rebuilt. The view of God is symbolized by the man, and the Jewish people as a woman.

"It is something so wonderful you can hardly imagine it. None of us has ever seen or touched anything like it. It is not just the stones it's built of. That's just the framework, like the peel of an orange. The Temple is the collective spirit of the people." Erzion is clever, like Lerner. But he is also poetic. Listening to him, I start to feel the loss of this mystical place. I feel the longing. For the Temple, and for this sensual union between God and man that he describes. Fundamentalism is always about longing, I remind myself, often for something that never existed.

In 1984, Israeli authorities uncovered a plot by Yehuda Erzion and coconspirators to destroy the Dome of the Rock, which the group called "the abomination." The group, an offshoot of Gush Emunim, was known as the Jewish Underground, or Makhteret. Until that point, the Gush Emunim settlers had eschewed violence, despite their messianic and fundamentalist outlook. Beginning in the 1980s, in the wake of the Camp David peace accords, the group began to despair of achieving its goals peacefully. Some members of the group, among them Erzion, turned increasingly violent, prepared, in the end, to risk a world war in pursuit of religious redemption for the Jewish people.

..

Gillon believes that the radical right continues to pose a grave threat to Israeli national security, perhaps even more than Hamas. "Here in Israel we don't like to say this very loudly, bur the radical-right Jewish groups have a lot in common with Hamas," he told me. Hamas and the radical-right groups have twin objectives: one religious, the other political, Gillon explains. Both use selective readings of history and of religious texts to justify violence over territory.

[Onkel Neal]

The U.N. failure on this score is no accident. It is a direct result of what the U.N. is, and how it works — a collective, saddled with procedures that tend to favor despots over democrats.

That sums up the UN for me.

Originally Posted by scandium

I ask Erzion to explain his feeling of urgency about rebuilding the Temple. "If you seek the kernel of meaning in the Temple," he says, "it is akin to the meeting of love between the Jewish people and God, or the attraction between men and women. The Jewish people are the female aspect, and they are missing their other, an other which can only be recovered when the Temple is rebuilt. The view of God is symbolized by the man, and the Jewish people as a woman.

Those guys are just insane.

[Yahoshua]

He sounds like a Kabbalist.....(Mysticism and stuff like that, similar to Charismatic Christianity).

[STEED]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

That sums up the UN for me.

I agree.

The U.N. as far as I am concern can not be trusted one bit.

[Iceman]

Quote from Scandium...

"That, like the entire article, is a very nice one dimensional view of things. Here's a bit from "Terror in the name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill", by Jessica Stern, to add a little more perspective:"

What part of what you quoted from Skybirds post was one dimensional???

Was it the part ...

"even before Hezbollah on July 12 launched its killing-kidnapping-and- rocket-firing assault on Israel. Hezbollah’s prior record entails well over two decades of kidnappings, hijackings, suicide bombings, massacres, and collateral carnage worldwide, in countries including Lebanon, Israel, Spain, Denmark, Germany, France, and Argentina....."

Or is it the part....

"Created by the totalitarian ayatollahs of Iran just after their 1979 Islamic revolution; trained and bankrolled by Iran; supported by Syria; seasoned in extortion and smuggling operations reaching as far as South America, Canada, and the U.S.; open to alliances with other terrorist groups; peddling terrorist propaganda internationally on its Al-Manar TV station; dedicated to the destruction of Israel and seeking ultimately to supplant the workings of free societies with its Iran-spawned creed and practice of terror… Hezbollah among its butcheries to date has murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group except al Qaeda...."


Is any of this in debate?..and if so what part?

A spade is a spade quit trying to change things into hearts which aren't and can't be.It gets down to the nity grity dirty little truth....and you can't get around it Scandium....Many many of these groups are just sick evil,murderous, peace Hating people and always will be until they die and for truly peace loving countries to ignore it will only result in they're own demise.What other dimnension is there except right and wrong except ones interpretation of it...you either like killing babies and innocent people or you don't.Action and deed is what is proof of ones intentions and the proof stares me in the face every night when I watch the news or see what happens around me everyday.For you to even suggest that there is some "One Sided" part of the truth you are correct, there is only one side of the truth and you don't seem to be on it.

Got to pick a side dude you can't sit on the fence on this one.

[scandium]

Originally Posted by Iceman

Is any of this in debate?..and if so what part?

A spade is a spade quit trying to change things into hearts which aren't and can't be.It gets down to the nity grity dirty little truth....and you can't get around it Scandium....Many many of these groups are just sick evil,murderous, peace Hating people and always will be until they die and for truly peace loving countries to ignore it will only result in they're own demise.What other dimnension is there except right and wrong except ones interpretation of it...you either like killing babies and innocent people or you don't.Action and deed is what is proof of ones intentions and the proof stares me in the face every night when I watch the news or see what happens around me everyday.For you to even suggest that there is some "One Sided" part of the truth you are correct, there is only one side of the truth and you don't seem to be on it.

Got to pick a side dude you can't sit on the fence on this one.

Indeed.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state...

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.

That is the side you would have me take? And to what end? I reject, completely, all forms of terrorism including the institutionalized state run terrorism that defines Israel's existance and has always defined it from the moment of its conception. If that is the bandwagon you want to jump on, then by all means do so, but it only makes you complicit in their crimes.

I reject, completely, all forms of terrorism including the institutionalized state run terrorism that defines Israel's existance and has always defined it from the moment of its conception. If that is the bandwagon you want to jump on, then by all means do so, but it only makes you complicit in their crimes.

Then you say explicitly that you reject the actions of hezbalah, hamas, al queida, and all other 'terrorist organizations' whether state sponsored or not?

[Drebbel]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

That sums up the UN for me.

Is it the U.N. or is it mankind ?

[Iceman]

You have picked your side Scandium, to try to dance around the facts you can't do no matter how you try. It cracks me up.

Either make the tree good and the fruit good or else ur firewood...if you continue to try to be lukewarm then you'll be placed on a side without a choice by others.

Take a Stand, don't choose not to stand.Yet to me your choice is Crystal Clear...you choose a side that is murderous and evil...so be it.Your a good dancer though I'll give ya that.

[Yahoshua]

"Burn pits for classified documents are NOT revel fires. Therefore it is wrong to dance naked around them." -The Skippy List

[Iceman]

Originally Posted by Yahoshua

"Burn pits for classified documents are NOT revel fires. Therefore it is wrong to dance naked around them." -The Skippy List

Doh? Ya lost me ..

[Yahoshua]

"Your a good dancer though I'll give ya that."

118. Burn pits for classified material are not revel fires - therefore it is wrong to dance naked around them.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=96263

[Iceman]

Originally Posted by Yahoshua

"Your a good dancer though I'll give ya that."

118. Burn pits for classified material are not revel fires - therefore it is wrong to dance naked around them.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=96263

LMAO:rotfl:

[scandium]

Originally Posted by waste gate

Then you say explicitly that you reject the actions of hezbalah, hamas, al queida, and all other 'terrorist organizations' whether state sponsored or not?

Of course. Violence begets violence, terror begets terror. Its the oldest story in the world.

If you beat your kids then there's a far higher than average probability that they will grow up to beat there kids as well.

In Israel this cyle has been playing out for over half a century. Both sides - the Israelis and the Palestinians - are brought up in a climate of fear, violence, oppression (it is one of the few remaining countries in the world, and perhaps the only "democracy", to still practice South African style Apartheid), and terror where each learns that the other is to be feared, to be hated, and that their's is the side that is right and is righteous. And then we see the results play out every day. Shootings, stabbings, bombings, houses bulldozed, people detained indefinitely and without charges. And on it goes.

I am generalizing somewhat, there are many exceptions on both sides, but unfortunately its the extremists on both sides who have been running the show for the last 50 years.

And what is even more frightening is that this cancer has seeped into U.S. policy to the point that you can no longer separate U.S. foreign policy from Israeli policy, even though, looked at objectively, the two countries have little in common and very different interests.

The War on Terror, the War in Iraq, both are products of an extremist neo-conservative ideology that is so sick as to believe that the policies that have been proven failures in Israel can be successful in Washington: thus the failed Israeli method of fighting terrorist cells with the armed forces has seen the US become as bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq as Israel has been in Lebanon (for 16 years and now they are again repeating the same failled mistakes under new leadership), in Gazza, and in the West Bank; Guantano Bay and Abu Ghraib, both abominations when contrasted with the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, are carbon copies of the Israeli approach to captured POWs and detained Palestinians; the PATRIOT Act, another abomination, is another carbon copy of the measures adopted by Israeli internal security apparatus. The USA is being remade in the image of Israel as American politicians sellout their country and its sovereignty to a narrow special interest group that has, in its lobbying efforts and funding, and unprecedented grip over a country founded on very different principles that is many times its size, far older, and has battled and beaten many of its own demons (slavery, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the defeat in Vietnam, the Cold War).

And meanwhile, as it is eroded and sold out on that front, the Saudis, Japanese, and Chinese happily dine on the leavings as they buy up more and more US debt to finance US proxy wars on Israel's behalf. Is this really in the U.S.'s best interest? I'm not qualified to judge, being Canadian, but I'd encourage some of the American patriots on this board to ask themselves honestly who the winners and losers are and if they're situation now, and their standing in the world, compared to 20 years ago following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of Communism in the USSR, has improved in the way it should have following the defeat of America's arch enemy.

And now my own country too has fallen victim to this same theft of our sovereignty as our current PM increasingly brings what has always been a balanced foreign policy in line with that of the US and its Israeli handlers.

Apologies if this comes off as a tirade. However after a lifetime of having smoke blown up my @ss I've finally begun to see through the fog and certain things have begun to crystalize. And I do not like what I see, or what inevitably lies over the horizon.