RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Who's a Terrorist?

I found this interesting editorial on a website called TomPaine.com.

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10022

Quote:

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Who's A Terrorist?

People in the business of conflict resolution routinely intervene in bloody, horrific wars and, by talking to all sides involved, try to guide the actors toward a more peaceful conclusion. Sounds like noble work, right? Not always, according to the USA PATRIOT Act. It all depends on whether the peace professionals are talking with terrorists, and "terrorism" is very much in the eye of the (U.S.) beholder.

The PATRIOT Act—a sweeping assault on civil liberties approved just after September 11 by every U.S. Senator except Russ Feingold, D-Wis.—includes a provision that criminalizes "expert advice and assistance" provided to terrorist organizations. As a result, anyone who provides advice on how to exit violent conflict to any of the 36 organizations on the State Department’s terrorism list could be liable for criminal prosecution. So, for instance, the World Tamil Coordinating Committee of Jamaica, New York, is potentially breaking the law by trying to help negotiate a permanent peace agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the opposition Tamil Tigers.

The provision applies beyond conflict resolution. The Federation of Tamil Sangams of North American (FETNA) wants to develop Tamil-language school curricula in areas of Sri Lanka controlled by the Tamil Tigers. The Humanitarian Law Project in California has provided training in international human rights law for members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK. Since the PKK and the Tamil Tigers have been on the State Department’s terrorism list since 1997, these efforts might well lead to a 15-year jail sentence.

The PATRIOT Act Takes A Hit

Rather than wait to be prosecuted, the above organizations brought suit against the Justice Department. On January 23, the California District Court partially upheld their challenge in Humanitarian Law Project v. John Ashcroft. By declaring the “expert advice and assistance” clause overly broad and infringing on First Amendment rights of free speech, the court struck the first successful legal blow against the PATRIOT Act. "We are harmed as a society when people refrain from exercising their First Amendment rights out of fear of being prosecuted and convicted under vague laws like the PATRIOT Act provision under challenge in the Humanitarian Law Project suit," says Nancy Chang, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) who was co-counsel in the case. Jeanne Herrick-Stare, a senior analyst on civil liberties at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, points out that it is difficult to know how many groups have cut back on their activities for fear of prosecution.

Humanitarian organizations often don’t care what agency, on paper, they’re dealing with, she notes, because “humanitarian organizations care about the hungry, the people who need the aid.”

For the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), it’s legal déjà vu. The Center mounted a legal challenge to the PATRIOT Act’s precursor, the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. A Clinton administration law, it criminalized “material support” of terrorist organizations even if that support was for the peaceful activities of the organization. In this case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that while the U.S. government could sue those providing cash and humanitarian aid to the designated terrorist groups, the provision of “personnel” and “training” was protected by the First Amendment. According to the CCR’s useful summary of court rulings on terrorism and civil liberties, the material support provision has been used in three jury convictions and several cases decided in plea bargaining. But until 2001, conflict resolution professionals could go about their business without fear of reprisal. The PATRIOT Act, which amended the “material support” provision to include “expert advice and assistance,” appeared to re-criminalize the negotiating, legal and medical services that some U.S.-based organizations are offering “terrorist” organizations.

In The Eye Of The Beholder

The term “terrorist” is controversial, as is the list of terrorist organizations that the State Department updates regularly. The ANC in South Africa, Likud in Israel, Sinn Fein in Ireland: these groups have all grown out of movements that were and sometimes still are called terrorist. The U.S. government has in the past supported groups that could easily be labeled terrorist, from the Contras in Nicaragua to RENAMO in Mozambique. Today, the State Department’s terrorism list is highly politicized. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement is included, largely as a thank-you to China for its support in the war on terrorism. The Kosovo Liberation Army never made it on the list because it was fighting against Serbia. Despite attacks against civilians, the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan has not been considered terrorist in Washington because it was useful in the fight against the Taliban just as Osama bin Laden and the mujahedin had been in the fight against the Soviets.

The PATRIOT Act not only reinforces this politicized designation but also discourages efforts to bring such groups into the political realm. The State Department’s labeling of two Philippine rebel groups as terrorist, for example, has led to an impasse in peace talks in that country’s 35-year-old civil war. The Cheney faction in the Bush administration believes that “evil” must be defeated, not negotiated with. But negotiating with those you disagree with is otherwise known as diplomacy. And encouraging negotiations between implacable foes, regardless of the names they throw at each other, goes by the name of conflict resolution.

“We make a deliberate decision to work with both sides, regardless of whether they are called ‘terrorist’ or something else,” says Richard Rubenstein, professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University. “If you’re not willing to work with ‘terrorists’ you’re not going to do conflict resolution.”

Conflict resolution professionals often act as neutral mediators, but sometimes they provide assistance and advice to groups to prepare them for negotiations. Ron Kraybill, who teaches in the conflict transformation program at Eastern Mennonite University, notes that “terrorists” don’t abruptly make a decision to engage in a negotiating framework: “they don’t walk in the door all by themselves; it’s a process.”

Portions of the PATRIOT Act are up for review by Congress, but the “expert advice and assistance” provision is not subject to the sunset clause. The Bush administration has meanwhile promised to veto legislation designed to scale back the worst excesses of the Act. So the courts, for better or worse, are where the action is. If the Justice Department successfully challenges the California District Court decision, conflict resolution as well as medical aid and legal advice may once again become treasonous. In the meantime, the January 23 ruling remains a slender victory not only for civil libertarians but for all those who hope to bring peace to war-torn regions.

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Thoughts?

Tompaine.com is one of those liberal anti-american websites.
I don't care what they say about anything.

In my mind a terrorist is a person who creates havoc and death to further their cause. A terrorist is also indescriminate in that they kill both civilians and government/military/religious targets. the difference between a freedom fighter (or other word) and the terrorist is that a terrorist purposefully kills innocents and civilians.

If a group kills govt and military targets that is part of the "war" that they are fighting for and a goal in winning. killing civilians is more about hate than justice. Terrorism is the ultimate hate crime.

Pretty much what PI said.

A freedom fighter doesn't murder civilians.

A terrorist doesn't give a shit about civilians.

A terrorist will openly murder civilians.

I'm going to recommend a movie: "The Battle of Algiers," probably one of the best and most realistic movies to explore the roots, ideaologies, and methods of terrorist organizations - but don't worry, it doesn't portray the terrorists as the good guys. It doesn't really take sides at all, actually. It's clearly left to the audience to decide who are the good guys and who are the bad guys (although after seeing this, I doubt any of you will be rooting for the terrorists). Your local Blockbusters should have it, or they mught be able to order it for you.

I watched The Siege after September 11th, and I was amazed at how close to reality it was. The movie was made in '98.

aaah, but Japan started it if you don't consider our blacklisting of Japan in World War 1 (for the uninitiated we made Britain choose between us and Japan.).

The Palestinians started it in the middle east.

The Germans started it in world war II.

Don't be mincing words..if someone starts it they screwed themselves. That's retalliation. Something different than terrorism.

But everyone has a different definition of started it and justified response/relatiation, or even the "slight" that causes retaliation. What you or I might take for a joke/good natured ragging , someone of another culture might take as a slap in the face/deliberate public humiliation.

Exactly..so don't mince words.

In recent history the area called Palestine includes the territories of present day Israel and Jordan (see map above. For earlier history of the term see article). From 1517 to 1917 most of this area remained under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. In World War I Ottoman Empire dissolved and its successor Turkey, transferred Palestine to British control with the Lausanne agreement that followed WW I.

In 1917 Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". In 1922 Britain allocated nearly 80% of Palestine to Transjordan. Thus, Jordan covers the majority of the land of Palestine under British Mandate. Jordan also includes the majority of the Arabs who lived there. In other words, Jordan is the Arab portion of Palestine.

The residents of Palestine are called "Palestinians". Since Palestine includes both modern day Israel and Jordan both Arab and Jewish residents of this area were referred to as "Palestinians".

It was only after the Jews re-inhabited their historic homeland of Judea and Samaria, that the myth of an Arab Palestinian nation was created and marketed worldwide. Jews come from Judea, not Palestinians. There is no language known as Palestinian, or any Palestinian culture distinct from that of all the Arabs in the area. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. "Palestinians" are Arabs indistinguishable from Arabs throughout the Middle East. The great majority of Arabs in greater Palestine and Israel share the same culture, language and religion.

Much of the Arab population in this area actually migrated into Israel and Judea and Samaria from the surrounding Arab countries in the past 100 years. The rebirth of Israel was accompanied by economic prosperity for the region. Arabs migrated to this area to find employment and enjoy the higher standard of living. In documents not more than hundred years, the area is described as a scarcely populated region. Jews by far were the majority in Jerusalem over the small Arab minority. Until the Oslo agreement the major source of income for Arab residents was employment in the Israeli sector. To this day, many Arabs try to migrate into Israel with various deceptions to become a citizen of Israel.

Even the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat himself, is not a "Palestinian". He was born in Egypt. The famous "Palestinian covenant" states that Palestinians are "an integral part of the Arab nation" -- a nation which is blessed with a sparsely populated land mass 660 times the size of tiny Israel (Judea, Samaria and Gaza included).

All attempts to claim Arab sovereignty over Israel of today, should be seen with their real intention: The destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and the only bulwark of the Judeo-Christian Western civilization in the Middle East.

Bling.......bling...

Politically motivated mythology of "Palestine"
Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian
identity serves only tactical purposes. The
founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool
in the continuing battle against Israel ...
-- Zuheir Muhsin, late Military Department head
of the PLO and member of its Executive
Council, Dutch daily Trouw, March 1977
The Prophet Muhammad said, "War is deception
-al-Bukhari, al-Jami al Sahih


Although a politically based mythology has grown up around and smothered, the documented past of the land known as "Palestine," there is recognition among preeminent scholars of what one of them has called "the more chauvinist Arab version of the region's history as having begun with the Arabs and Islam."1

The claim that Arab-Muslim "Palestinians" were "emotionally tied" to "their own plot of land in Palestine" -- based upon a "consistent presence" on "Arab" land for "thousands of years"2 -- is an important part of that recent mythology.

It was contrived of late in a thus far successful Orwellian propaganda effort-an appeal to the emotions that would "counter Zionism" and that "serves" tactical purposes as a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel," as the late PLO official Muhsin stated candidly in an interview, quoted at the beginning of this chapter.

In order to understand how that tool, aided by a general near-ignorance of the "unrelenting past," has distorted the perception of the present, a look at the "yesterday" of "Palestine" is necessary.

The inspection will be focused upon completing a circle-tracing the actual conditions and events that have been glossed over or omitted from the dialogue about the Arab-Israeli conflict; they are conditions and events that shaped the real political, economic, and demographic circumstances in the area. Those circumstances in turn critically affected what "justice" really consists of-for the Jewish and Arab refugees, or the "Palestinian Problem"-for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Illuminating that situation reveals and fills in the chasm between the documented facts and the Arab claims, and gives perspective to those contentions and assumptions that have become key in interpreting what is "just" for the population in question today.

"The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 A.D. hardly lasted, as such, 22 years...," the Muslim chairman of the Syrian Delegation attested in his remarks to the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919.3

The British Palestine Royal Commission reported in 1937 that "it is time, surely, that Palestinian 'citizenship' . . . should be recognized as what it is, as nothing but a legal formula devoid of moral meaning."4

That the claim of "age-old Arab Palestinian rights to Arab Palestine" is contradicted by history has been pointed out by eminent historians and Arabists.

According to the Reverend James Parkes, "The Land was named Palestina by he Romans to eradicate all trace of its Jewish history..."

It may seem inappropriate to have devoted so much time to "a situation which passed away two thousand years ago." But it is only politically that the defeat by Rome, and the scattering of the Jewish population, made a decisive change in the history of The Land. That which had been created by more than a thousand years of Jewish history [a thousand years before A.D. 135] remained, as did that which was beginning to be created in the thoughts of the young Christian Church.5
Many authorities have addressed the misconceptions surrounding the word Palestine. The name derived from "other migrants from the northwest, the Philistines. Though the latest arrivals, and though they only exercised control over the whole country for a few uncertain decades, they had been the cause of its name of Palestine. These Philistines were an Aegean people, driven out of Greece and Aegean islands around about 1300 B.C.E. They moved southward along the Asiatic coast and in about 1200 attempted to invade Egypt. Turned back, they settled in the maritime plain of southern 'Palestine', where they founded a series of city-states."6
According to Bernard Lewis, an eminent authority, "The word Palestine does not occur in the Old Testament. . . . Palestine does not occur in the New Testament at all."

The official adoption of the name Palestine in Roman usage to designate the territories of the former Jewish principality of Judea seems to date from after the suppression of the great Jewish revolt of Bar-Kokhba in the year 135 C.E.... it would seem that the name Judea was abolished ... and the country renamed Palestine or Syria Palestina, with the ... intention of obliterating its historic Jewish identity. The earlier name did not entirely disappear, and as late as the 4th century C.E. we still find a Christian author, Epiphanius, referring to "Palestine, that is, Judea."
As many, including Professor Lewis, have pointed out, "From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity.7 [See the map of "Ancient Palestine" in Appendix I"
In other words, it appears that Palestine never was an independent nation and the Arabs never named the land to which they now claim rights. Most Arabs do not admit so candidly that "Palestinian identity" is a maneuver "only for political reasons" as did Zuheir Muhsin. But the Arab world, until recently, itself frequently negated the validity of any claim of an "age-old Palestinian Arab" identity.

The Arabs in Judah-cum-Palestine were regarded either as members of a "pan-Arab nation," as a Muslim community, or, in a tactical ploy, as "Southern Syrians."8 The beginning article of a 1919 Arab Covenant proposed by the Arab Congress in Jerusalem stated that "The Arab lands are a complete and indivisible whole, and the divisions of whatever nature to which they have been subjected are not approved nor recognized by the Arab nation."9 In the same year, the General Syrian Congress had the opposite view; it expressed eagerness to stress an exclusively Syrian identity: "We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine . . .'10 The Arab historian George Antonius delineated Palestine in 1939 as part of "the whole of the country of th name [Syria] which is now split up into mandated territories..."11 As late a the 1950s, there was still a schizoid pattern to the Arab views. In 1951, the Constitution of the Arab Ba'ath Party stated:

The Arabs form one nation. This nation has the natural right to live in a single state and to be free to direct its own destiny ... to gather all the Arabs in a single independent Arab state.12
A scant five years later, a Saudi Arabian United Nations delegate in 1956 asserted that "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria."13 In 1974, Syria's President Assad, although a PLO supporter, incorporated both claims in a remarkable definition:
... Palestine is not only a part of our Arab homeland, but a basic part of southern Syria." 14
The one identity never seriously considered until the 1967 Six-Day War -- and then only as a "tool" -- was an "Arab Palestinian" one, and the absence was not merely disregard. Clearly there was no such age-old or even century-old "national identity." According to the British Palestine Royal Commission Report,
In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest Palestine has virtually dropped out of history.... In economics as in politics Palestine lay outside the main stream of the world's life. In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it made no contribution to modem civilization. Its last state was worse than its first.15
1 . P.J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (London, 1978), p. 254.
2. Thames Television Series, London, "Palestine," aired in the United States January February, 1979.

3. Minutes of the Supreme Council, in D.H. Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris, 22 vols. (New York, 1924), vol. 14, p. 405

4. Palestine Royal Commission Report, Command Paper # 5479,1937, p. 120, para. 14.

5. James Parkes, Whose Land? (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 31.

6. Ibid., p. 17.

7.Bernard Lewis, "The Palestinians and the PLO, a Historical Approach," Commentary, January 1975, p. 32-48.

8. Yehoshua Porath, "Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian National Movement," in Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, M. Milson, ed. (New York, 1973), pp. 101, 107, 119.

9. Marie Syrkin, "Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal," in Michael Curtis et al., eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 200. Syrkin found that Haj Amin al-Husseini-the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem himself - "originally opposed the Palestine Mandate because it separated Palestine from Syria." Ibid.

10. Ibid. According to Neville Mandel, Arabs and Zionism Before World War I (Berkeley, 1976), p. 152, n. 49: "After World War 1, when the nature of an independent Arab state and it's component parts were being discussed, the term 'Greater Syria' was advanced to embrace the Fertile Crescent and its desert hinterland. Palestine, as an integral part of that area, was dubbed 'Southern Syria.' But these terms were not in use in 1913 and 1914, when very few nationalists contemplated complete Arab independence."

11. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening. The Story of the Arab National Movement (Philadelphia, New York, Toronto: J.B. Lippincott, 1939), p. 15, n.1; also see Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, pp. 151-153.

12. The Balath Party "describes itself as a 'national, popular revolutionary movement fighting for Arab unity, Freedom and Socialism,"' in 1951. Syrkin, "Nationalism," in Curtis et al., Palestinians; p. 200; also see Menahem Milson, "Medieval and Modem Intellectual Traditions in the Arab World," in Daedalus, Summer 1972, particularly pp. 24-26; Michel Aflaq, prominent Ba'athist and Christian, on Arab Nationalism, cited in Milson, above; also see Aflaq, Fi Sabil al Baath (Arabic) Beirut, 1962 (3rd printing), cited in Milson, p. 26; also see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 (London: Oxford, 1962), particularly p. 301.

13. Ahmed Shukeiry, as head of the PLO, to Security Council on May 31, 1956, cited by Syrkin in "Nationalism," in Curtis et al., Palestinians, p. 201.

14. President Hafez Assad of Syria, Radio Damascus, March 8, 1974.

15. Palestine Royal Commission Report, Chapter 1, p. 6, para. 11.


Blinga...

Read more...

http://www.science.co.il/History-Palestine.asp

And more....

http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/


there's plenty more..do a google search and you'll find a great deal...from both sides and be able to get at teh heart of teh matter and see propaganda for propaganda.