Defining "terrorist"

The point is not to define "terrorist" -- we know that terrorists are those who do not fight on a battlefield but among a civilian population, i.e. creating "terror" by means of random attacks against those not armed for or actively engaged in battle.

The point, as I see it at least, is, with the kind of weapons now available widely to activist splinter groups, that it is the presence of these terrorist factions which are now re-defining war.

The potentially widespread availability not only of ballistic but nuclear weaponry has changed the rules of the game -- and as a consequence we are all at risk.

Those who assert their cause -- just cause or no -- by terrorist means, diminish the impact of negotiation and diplomacy, not only for their adversaries but for themselves and everyone else.

How are those under this type of assault to behave within previously agreed upon limits of force and power?

How can the Geneva Convention remain relevant when one's adversary pays it no mind and it is not even applicable to them, for they wage war without being a "convention"al nation?

I am not asking snidely -- I am wondering how we can continue to define the boundaries of warfare by the same standards in a world so different from the one for which they were designed. Or how we may better understand a world so changed by those same bombs we've leveraged previously for peace.

It is difficult to take the high-road when there's threat of it being unexpectedly blown up.

I think that this can serve as an interesting rebuttal to the previously posted nytimes op ed on Gaza. The agenda with this one here, is an attempt to frame it in terms of an Israeli assertion of power and infringement on human rights, as opposed to a more desperate defensive action born out of Israeli disenfranchisement in the region, as seemed to be the argument in the previous article. Interesting to consider in the conversation. I have no idea what I think. I'm stressed out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/opinion/08khalidi.html?ref=opinion

Suffering in Gaza

If war were a simple numbers game, then some of it's more profound complexities might not be such a problem; who struck first and who killed more would be the primary questions we would be compelled to answer.

But those are questions which can be answered largely in fact. The hardest question which faces us in understanding the "rights" and "wrongs" of war -- with such hairs never easily split -- is in regard to the facts of history itself, and nowhere more so than as pertains to the intractable Gordian knot of Israel and the Middle East.

Pushed to its moral extreme, the idea of justice in warfare, such as it is, insists that one side may lay claim to more ethically murdering its enemies. And as absurd as that may sound to the more highly developed faculties of our reasonable humanity, the imperatives of survival often encompass such oxymoronic terrain as its being predicated on neighbors killing neighbors, brothers killing brothers and even fathers killing sons.

So when we look to history for answers in such matters it can do little for us by way of discerning what is True with Irrevocable Clarity, because at it's bare bones, there is no more history for any individual, group, or nation beyond the point of survival.

And with survival paramount to history, and history, but for choosing selectively from it, a cacophonous melange of competing interests for wealth and land -- for survival -- how easily can we ever address what is truly just in a way that can be unanimously agreed on?

Well. that's a tough one. Probably not easily at all. Ever.

So as I am not prepared to address that adequately, nor questions pertaining to the existence of good and evil, nor whether there is any kind of quantifiable, objective, most-true vision of reality in the ultimately numbered days of mankind to be had, here is a link to one side's proposal of clarity -- albeit biased in the extreme -- re Israel's aggressive response to Hamas.

Bias, at least, in full disclosure.

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/804034/jewish/How-Do-I-Explain-Israels-Actions.htm

N.B. If anyone has or can find a clear and rational elucidation of how those who support the destruction of Israel through terrorist means justify that belief, I would appreciate seeing it posted or linked.