Monday, August 8, 2011

How Osama Bin Laden Changed Terrorism

Read it here.
Posted by Stephen Marche
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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousAugust 12, 2011 at 1:11 AM

    Terrorism didn't die with Bin Laden, any more than "irony" which was pronounced dead in the wake of 9/11. Your entire premise is based on your narrow and erroneous definition of terrorism. It's not about who does it. Terrorism isn't the domain of small, stupid men who can't get recognition any other way. Terrorism is the action or threat of action to instill such overwhelming fear as to ensure the acheivement of a goal. The terrorist is the person who plans, commits or threatens to commit that action. It doesn't matter if you're flying planes into sky-scrapers or using overwhelming military force to invade two countries and overthrow their governments. To the people on the other end, it's all terrorism.
    I also found it particularly rich when you have to say something almost positive about him, you resort to "legitimately close to a type of poltical hero" and "a freedom fighter" which were true enough when the US wanted him to get rid of the Soviets, but then there's this. You refer to him as a "Muslim Jesse James". Because everyone knows that Jesse James was a freedom fighter and almost politcal hero. Really? I think I must have missed that item in history class. Was that before or after he became a theif and murderer, or after?
    It is the comfortable assumption of people who have no experience of it, that only the bad guys are terrorists. The good guys can't be terrorists because we are the good guys and we wouldn't use terror to get our way. There are a lot of dead Iraqi and Afgan civilians who would disagree. For the people in those places terrorism is alive every time some foreign soldier kicks in their door to search their home in the middle of the night.
    You can deny reality all you like, but you can't kill it, and you can't kill terror.

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