RE: Critical Thinking Exercise: Why is Terrorism so Hard to Define?

[tommycordero]

It is important that we stress the fact that terrorism shouldn't have a vague definition. Thank you for writing this. One of my first articles actually deals with the fact that terrorism is so loosely defined that a person can actually be accused of terrorism for posting on Steemit.

Comments

[stevescoins]

You bring up a good point: we have seen this in play

From my earlier post "Crime Theory, overcriminilization, and technology"

You can see politicians pushing new “bullying” laws, which they will use to silence their opposition or any criticism. “An incumbent legislator has threatened cable companies with litigation if they run advertisements citing his voting record in the Texas House. Meanwhile, the same lawmaker’s chief of staff demanded that a website publishing his votes be shut down, citing a law designed to protect teenagers from cyber-bullying on social media websites. “ (Gutowski,2014, para 1)

Your own post brought up some complementary issues:

• The islamic ideology against gays
• Arabs and Jews are ethnically the same people (See Paul Johnson's excellent "A History of the Jews"); an easy difference to see when they were clothing defining themselves culturally, not so easy to tell apart
  otherwise)
• There is a movement against anonymity coming from "the elite"; the same people that prevent direct action against known terrorists seem to want to keep everyone else in line

I have a post in mind concerning the strelsky, bandits the Chekists used to terrorize the Russian people into compliance with "security" measures.

Thanks for the contribution!