Neo, I’ve been in favor of calling Palestinian suicide bombers as suicide murders to be more accurate.

I love how you pull in other topics like counseling and reframing into your posts. I find people are often negative and judgmental and with very little energy or due diligence will state things about another that aren’t even true. I often will reframe at work (naturally) to re-characterize someone to another and what their actions were. I get two different reactions: 1) Many will dig in and be more insistent pulling in other events – to which I say repeatedly I don’t know about those things I’m only referring to the one issue – and usually to no avail so I have to let it go 2) Some will actually look at you with surprise and actually say I never thought of it that way.

Neo, you are a great writer and I often come to read your work but mostly only post at Sister Toldjah’s blog (which is how I found you because somebody mentioned you about 2 years ago).

I hope you like writing because I hope to see it for many more years.

Terrorism is getting inputs from two or more different philosophies and basic pool of definitions. That’s because every side wants terrorism to be defined by their specific preference. So that means some of the connotative definitions of terrorism becomes inconsistent with other definitions.

That tends to happen when people call GitMo terrorism, Bush terrorism, etc and then we use the same word for suicide bombings.

Mitt lumps four completely different elements into a neat, ideological heap ignoring the complexity of each.

They are not four completely different elements. Just as there are different CO[m]munist, Neo-m[a]rxist, Soc[i]alist, and Democrat Soci[a]lists parties amongst the nations of the world, just because geographically their origins are different doesn’t mean ideologically they are completely different.

Terrorism is an apt definition for those groups. There are individual differences, but you only require the knowledge of them if you are specifically planning to target and destroy one of the groups. We’re not talking about strategic planning to destroy Hizbollah. If we were, then yes calling Hizbollah terrorism would be vague and counter-productive. But we’re not, are we.

Under this standard, it is definitely not okay for the media to be vague about a specific group that did a specific attack, and they just aren’t going to tell you who did it.

How would you deal with “four completely different elements” whose means to an end are identical?

Words can also blind one to the reality of any given situation. While I don’t disagree with Neo’s reflection on the medias sanitization through effective self censorship (the term “illegal alien” is another excellent example) I would assert that the term “terrorist” has come to encompass such a broad expanse of undesirable ideologies that it is, in effect, a blind fold. Consider the following terrorist groups:

Hezbollah
Abu Sayyaf
Al Qaeda

While the fundamental core of each of these groups differs greatly we still willingly lump them into the same category. Or, better yet, this:

“”This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood,” so said Mitt Romney in addressing the subject of terrorism and the “long war.”

Mitt lumps four completely different elements into a neat, ideological heap ignoring the complexity of each. This homogenous ideology leads to similarly shallow policies in terms of dealing with each.

Will someone please challenge it?

All that just reinforces what neo’s trying to say: if we remove “terrorist” from the language, and don’t call people who commit acts of terror “terrorists,” then we’re changing the way we think about them. They become “freedom fighters,” “radicals,” “insurgents,” and the like, such that we aren’t “judgemental” about their actions. This is a grave mistake, because we need to be “judgemental” about these actions; we need to understand the nature of the people who commit these atrocious acts; and we need to know the difference between “freedom fighters” and psycopathic thugs.

From the first article: Most news organizations, of course, have long since slashed their foreign bureaus in favor of saving money and running AP content….And readers haven’t exactly beaten down newsroom doors demanding first-hand reportage.

From the second, written in 1999: If anything, the Internet has exposed and accelerated several unhappy trends in international coverage that the news industry has inflicted upon itself this decade — the slashing of foreign bureaus, over-reliance on wire services and stringers, ignorance of foreign editors and the advent of ‘logo’ journalism.

I obtained a good deal more information on the subject at a talk I attended given by Jules Crittenden, journalist and editor at the Boston Herald, who spoke at length on the subject, including how much the stories are generally re-written by the paper.

If you read AP stories and take a good look at them, you’ll see that the labeling of terrorists as “fighters,” “militants” and/or “insurgents” is reflexive. In the story in question, the Somalian public official clearly used the word “terrorist” in every direct quote attributed to him, and yet the AP uses the generic in its summaries of what he said.

The BBC is well known (as is Reuters) for having a highly restrictive policy on the use of the word “terrorist” (see this : ….we must be careful not to give the impression that we have come to some kind of implicit – and unwarranted – value judgment. See also this lengthy discussion from Canada, in which the editor of the AP stylebook describes the AP policy on the subject: Words like gunmen, separatist and rebel are often more precise than terrorist and less likely to be viewed as judgmental…We often prefer the more specific words for that reason. “Separatist” and “rebel” are certainly not any more specific than “terrorist,” however; they are equally open to interpretation. What they are is more morally neutral.)