Poll: Can governments be guilty of "terrorism?"

[Chris Alger]

"The problem here is very deep and it is related to the fact that the Palestinians (and the Arabs in general) are not truly reliable partners for peace with Israel. Their goals are still to take all of Israel back, by force if necessary."

In other words, they're "unreliable" partners of the Israeli government because a few of them think and act like the Israeli government and it's US supporters, and must therefore be crushed.

[MMMMMM]

I fail to see the connection.

They say one thing, then turn right around and attack. Not exactly confidence-inspiring for making or relying on peace agreements.

[adios]

"Fox ultimately has to do what Murdoch, who has well-known political opinions and thousands of commercial interests, tells them."

In the US NPR which receives ferderal funding is well known for having a liberal bias. Still say that FoxNews is for the most part balanced. Not perfect I guess (don't watch it that much) and perhaps not great journalism. Don't think the media is controlled by their sponsors that much but they are influenced I suppose to some degree. A bit late (perhaps early, early morning) on the other side of the pond isn't it?

[Rushmore]

Nobody has asked yet, so I will:

Does dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki qualify as terrorism?

What about the firebombing of Dresden?

Please do not present as justification for the atomic bombings in Japan the fact that there were countless American troops on transports in the Sea of Japan, and that ultimately, Truman's action "saved lives."

This argument always brings up the bile in me.

I don't think there were too many children, handicapped, or elderly out there in the Sea of Japan.

No, I'd say the point was to terrify.

And Dresden? Why incinerate all of the people of Dresden, if not to terrify? Did we really need to destroy those museums, and the citizenry was just collateral damage?

Yes, I'd say that governments can definitely be guilty of committing terrorist acts.

But I guess you were talking about Israel.

OK. then. Let's recap. Both the United States government AND the government of the nation in the Middle East that we seem to have decided to nearly single-handedly finance have perpetrated atrocious acts of terrorism against noncombatants in attempts to further political agendas.

Welcome to History of The World.

[Gamblor]

If you are willing to accept Netanyahu:
Netanyahu

Here is a full website devoted to bbc bias:
BBC Watch

But this is the best of example of outright media fraud concerning Israel.

The Photo that started it all

And now I wait for Chris to find some pathetic, stretching-the-fabric-of-credibility reason why you shouldn't trust these sites.

[Chris Alger]

Of course you see it, you're just refusing to admit it by changing your reason about why Palestinians are "unreliable" partners.

To make it simple: if the PA is an unreliable peace partner because many Palestinians refuse to acknowledge the right of a Jewish state to exist, then Israel is unreliable because it refuses to acknowldge the right of a Palestinian state to exist.

[Chris Alger]

This is the reason that "terrorism" isn't a very useful concept and in current parlance has assumed an Orwellian quality. Of course Hiroshima was a far greater act of terrorism than all non-state terrorism that's infected the Middle East -- and probably everywhere -- in recent decades. But those that perpretrated it aren't denounced as "terrorists," but are accorded the respect of statesmen. After all, unlike "terrorists," they had defensible if perhaps flawed reasons (they had imperfect information, suffered intense political pressures, had better political goals, the "other side started it," etc.). But when it comes to smaller scale, retail terrorists, to even discuss the motives and reasoning, the political goals and desperation behind such actions amounts to an unconscionable legitimation of their methods.

You see the results of this all the time. One is the stifling of inquiry and rational thought and discourse, shown by the thread about Syria sitting on an antiterrorism committee. Another is that the U.S. is supposedly at "war" with a mode of violence the it often embraces, allowing propagandists of totalitarian bent to tar their critics with a "soft-on-terrorism" brush to discourage them from being heard. (E.g., the Wall St. Journal claiming that Joe Wilson "doesn't support" Bush's "war against terrorism" because he opposed the conquest of Iraq). People wear T-shirts with targets over the faces of relatively small-time terrorists as they walk into polling places to vote for much worse ones. And on and on, all symptoms of an unconscious culture drunk with self-righteousness, armed to the teeth and poised for ruin.

[andyfox]

Strategic bombing was developed precisely to terrorize civilian populations so that infratructure would be destroyed and they would implore their governments to surrender. This was explicit in the literature, most famously exposited by Giulio Douhet, Hugh Trenchard and Billy Mitchell.

Of course governments can be guilty of terrorism. In fact, they commit far more terrorist acts that result in millions of more casualties than those individuals who are commonly referred to as terrorists.

[ACPlayer]

They say one thing, then turn right around and attack. Not exactly confidence-inspiring for making or relying on peace agreements

Now I am really, really confused. i thought all along you supported the Israeli positions.

[nicky g]

Link one: Orlan Guerin, in reporting violence against Israelis, refers to violence against Palestinians. It's what's known as "balance" and "context."

Link 2: A report which basically states "The BBC does not toe the Israeli line". Outrageous. For instance one of its criticisms is that the BBC describes the Occupied Territories as "Occupied Territories", rather than disputed territories, and out-and-out pro-Israeli term. I don't have time to go into the repeated deliberatley misleading comments and selective quotation in any depth. Here's a perfect example though, quoting a BBC profile of Arafat:

[ QUOTE ]
"But when the peace process failed to live up to expectations, more and more Palestinians lost patience with his mercurial and dictatorial style of leadership"

Rather than criticise Arafat's dictatorship, it is painted mildly as a character defect, with a hint that it is anyway only the result of the failure of the peace process, which could perhaps be blamed on Israel"

[/ QUOTE ]

Their conclusion is completely absurd and the quoted text does not remotely support it. How describing someone's leadership as "mercurial and dictatorial" can be perceived as anything other than critical is beyond me. There's no mention of Israel, or whether it's Israel's fault.

The report, while quoting every section it deems to be favourable to Arafat, ignores the following quote from the profile for example:

"From his earliest days, Mr Arafat has indulged in the weaving of myths about his life, insisting, for example, that he was born in Jerusalem even though his birth, in 1929, is clearly recorded in Egypt."

Again, information about Arafat that is clearly portrays him in a negative light. It goes on to describe him as autocratic and engaging in bribery. It also describes him in more postitive terms such as "personal courage", which is obviously true. Again, this what is known as balance in journalistic circles. If the Israel often looks bad in BBC reports it's because Israel routinely engages in behaviour that goess against the norms of accepted behaviour. If Israel engages in collective punishment or reprisals against civilians, a strategy it openly admits to using, then the BBC has a duty to report it. If you watch the BBC you'll see that suicide bombings always get far more coverage than the killing of Palestinians. The BBC always reports a suicide bombing, regardless of whether there are any caualties. It routinely fails to report the deaths of Palestinian civilians (I doubt it could keep up with them), in line with nearly every major Western news organisation.

Link 3: I fail to see what this has to with the BBC. The fact that the New York Times, not exactly a bastion of pro-Palestinian symapthies, was the first to run it suggests that it was a straightforward mistake.