when is terrorism justified?

It seems to me that terror can be justified when the freedom and livelihoods of millions of people are at stake, and these people can't respond to military action by an agressor with the rightful means of military defense. Exemplary cases are the decade-long bloody oppression of the palestinian people by the jewish state or the current oppression of iraqi freedom by american troops.

AceOfBase do you believe that Israel has a right to exist?

Terrorism can never be justified when it targets innocents.

Originally posted by Leveller
Terrorism can never be justified when it targets innocents.

Does the same also apply to bombing campaigns and genocidal aka Sharon policies where hundreds of thousands of innocents left their lives or where robbed of their property or are confined to live miserably in fugitive camps? Can such a policy aka the jewish state or the war in Iraq be justified when there are hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian victims on the arab side? Isnt this (Israel/USA) a much more thorough and long-lasting form of terrorism that targets many more people than Al-Qaeda or the palestinian freedom fighters ?


[edit on 13-9-2004 by Mokuhadzushi]

Originally posted by Mokuhadzushi

Originally posted by Leveller
Terrorism can never be justified when it targets innocents.

Does the same also apply to bombing campaigns and genocidal aka Sharon policies where hundreds of thousands of innocents left their lives or where robbed of their property or are confined to live miserably in fugitive camps?

If they deliberately target innocent civilians - yes.

Originally posted by Leveller

Originally posted by Mokuhadzushi

Originally posted by Leveller
Terrorism can never be justified when it targets innocents.

Does the same also apply to bombing campaigns and genocidal aka Sharon policies where hundreds of thousands of innocents left their lives or where robbed of their property or are confined to live miserably in fugitive camps?

If they deliberately target innocent civilians - yes.

Interesting. According to your reading Israel and the United States are bloodthirsty rogue states. The number of palestinian civilians robbed of their lands, tortured and living in fugitive camps is a couple of million... The number of iraqi civilians deliberately killed (necessary side-effect of bombing campaigns) ranks in the tens of thousands...

Palestinian and Iraqi or Al Qaeda Terrorism is therefore nothing but a response in self-defense to the state terrorism exerted by these nations...

Originally posted by Mokuhadzushi
Interesting. According to your reading Israel and the United States are bloodthirsty rogue states.

Sorry to dissapoint you my little fun-damentalist friend. But by my reading, Israel and the United States do not deliberately target civilians, whereas your little Jihad buddies do.

As you've already stated - the Iraqi civilians were collateral. The ammunition used in the majority of airstrikes in Iraq was precision guided - hardly what we would use if we were actually targetting civilians. After all, if we wanted huge casualty numbers of innocents we could just drop a few daisy cutters or nuke a few towns.

Believe me, if we were aiming to kill arab civilians, you wouldn't be sitting there at your keyboard now. Our technology means that we could wipe you out without even breaking sweat.

Originally posted by verfed
AceOfBase do you believe that Israel has a right to exist?

If I could change the past, they would not be there.

But now?
Yes, they should exist because they're already there in such great numbers.

I do wish however, that a little more respect would be given to the inhabitants of Palestine whom the Jewish population met there when they arrived.

I now have a question for you.
Do you believe that Palestinians have a right to inhabit that land also or should they all be cleansed out and forced into Jordan and Syria?


[edit on 13-9-2004 by AceOfBase]

Delibrately targeting civilians? Why that would make hiroshima an act of terror! Are you saying the US armed forces are a terror organization?!?!

You must hate the US to say thing like that!

Originally posted by they see ALL
NOW

www.abovetopsecret.com...

that is the answer...

I completely agree. Terrorism is nothing more than a form of asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is the only way for a weaker force to mach the equipment and coordination of a better equipped one. Wonder why terrorists hit civilians? Civilians don't drive tanks or carry automatic weapons (for the most part). If you only define terrorism as an act of agression against civilian innocents, then Hiroshima/Nagasaki was terrorism.

Ultimately, it is simply another effort at asymmetrical warfare. As such, to some extent, I applaud the terrorists of recent times as having developed themselves into an effective fighting force. This is not to say that I like seeing video of charred busses or hearing stories of children held hostage at a school. Far from it...I find the after effects of their actions to be atrocious. Of course, so too is war atrocious. Simply put, from a tactical perspective, many recent terrorist attacks have been highly successful.

Originally posted by Flyboy211

Well if you were aware of things at the time the military was not in one big place with a big bullseye saying "Yeah right on the head!" they were spread out, decentralised. A fullscale invasion would've cost AT LEAST 1 million casualties for the Allies, not to mention countless Japanese civilian lives. Again i don't like doing the numbers game but simply the Allies were running out of time, Japan wouldn't yield so that needed a 'miracle' weapon to end the war.

It is NOT the exact same thing as 9/11,that attack was unprovoked, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were at the end of WW2! How can you say they're the exact same thing??

So what would you have suggested instead of the atom bombs? Anything? Very costly invasion? What exactly?

I don't think it was a pleasant thing to do, but considering the circumstances there wasn't much choice. Don't tell me any other country wouldn't have done differently because i can guarantee you that any other country would've done EXACTLY the same if not worse.

You can't possible say the situations were the same, that's ridiculous. If America wanted to change a country's political standing or to 'coerce' it to change it would NOT fire a nuclear missile at it, fly planes towards their buildings or any such method. It also does not specifically target civilians.

yes!!!

the atom bombs were used to END THE WAR...

9/11 was used to END THE WAR (before it even started. in the terrorists' eyes)...

same thing...

i agree the atom bombs were used to save allied lives and so was 9/11 (in the terrorists' eyes)

they ARE the same thing but to understand this, we MUST look with eyes of a terrorist...

are you a terrorist???

NO!!!

so we cannot understand them and their cause...

The Surrounding Arab countries have allowed the palestinian refugees to fester and grow from 700,000 to 4,000,000. They will not absorb them into their own countries. Israel absorbed the 900,000 Jews that the Arabs pushed out of their lands after the 1949 cease-fire. The Arabs want the palestinians to stay in their refugee camps as a breeding ground for suicide bombers. The Arabs need to do the humanitarian thing and take in the palestinians and assimilate them just like Israel is doing with millions of jews from around the world and just like America is doing with millions of people from anywhere. The Israeli's can't force Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or Lebenon to take back their Muslim brothers but Israel can protect their own people by isolating the palestinians.

palestinian refugees


Why can't the worlds 13 million jews have just ONE little sliver of land to call their own? Why can't the "palestinians" move in among their 1 billion Muslim brothers?

If you don't know what TERRORISM is then you have not been around these last couple of weeks, when thousands of people have died .... at a single time.... from beheadings do car bombs to shootings to planes flying into buildings and kill ing thousands you stupid # for even considering Bost Tea Party a Terreristic plan. The reason we didn't have terroristic plots is because we didn't have foreign people in OUR country and we all understood each other and knew that you could turn around and walk 25 damn steps and not get shot in the back. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i think a decent case could be made for the tea party being terrorism in that it was destruction of the british east india companies property in an effort to sway the government of england to change its tea taxes. does someone need to die in order for it to be terrorism? terrorism is much more than just flying planes into buildings or beheading civilians. it could be blowing up a power grid which doesn kill anyone but causes problems due to power outages, it could be poisoning the water supply, it could be deleting hard drives, it could be blowing up a bridge to make travel more difficult, there are many many things that could be terrorism, limited only by ones thoughtfulness.


some more interesting information:

history of biological terror---it goes way way back, alot farther than i would have guessed:

www.fortworthgov.org...

a brief history of terrorism-- some interesting points but also leaves out some major things i wouild also consider terrorism:
www.cdi.org...

One thing I also draw from reading history is that countries who do not adapt to the rules of war generally lose. Are the rules of war now that there are no rules---total war win by any means necessary?




[edit on 9/13/04 by spangbr]

[edit on 9/13/04 by spangbr]