Merits of Terrorism

For this week’s blog post it is on the merits of terrorism. This is interesting because as we learned in class and from our nomenclature assignment, it is very hard to define terrorism. I firmly believe that you cannot use the word terrorism as a universal term. Terrorism must be used on a case to case basis and should never be used as a general term because there are so many factors that go into an act being called a terrorist act. As far as the question of whether terrorism works or not, I believe in many cases it does. Take September 11^th for example. These extreme groups such as al quieda wanted to be known and to be heard and to get their religion out there so people knew not to mess with them. In this case it obviously worked because what did everyone talk about, the Muslims. You know the old saying any news is good news, well in this case even though bin laden and Hussein were being talked about in a negative way, they now have a spotlight on them and are getting large amounts of attention. This brought upon a greater respect for the Muslim culture. By a greater respect I don’t mean that Americans now want to join this religion and learn about, but more similar to your star football player that’s a cocky ass hole. Even though you don’t like him you still are civil with him and don’t mess with him because you know how strong he is and you are almost scared of him. Me personally I guess I could be considered an extremist in the sense that I feel no pity for the Muslim culture after what happened on 9/11. Like the article I had to read in class about the lady who wrote the story the day after the attacks, I agree with her that anybody that had a smirk on their face that day should be held responsible. Personally I am not against war, but I believe that is we are over there trying to put a democratic government in place and all these people are worried about is blowing up things, then we should get out of there so these terrorists cannot harm our soldiers. Terrorism is a tough term that should not have a generic definition attached to it. For example all the 5 situations we went through in class all were different situations and to some they should have been considered terrorism, but to others they thought they shouldn’t be.  

Debate 4

The basic argument of debate four was either for world involvement or against world involvement. I am going to have to say that the con side came out on top of this debate. I agree with what they were saying in the sense of what America’s involvement in the world should be. The blonde girl on the con side brought up some good rebuttals when the pro side was talking about how good some areas are because of what we did. In response, she said how do we know where this culture or area would be if we did not interfere with them. For example in the case of the Iraqi war, we are over there trying to force our ideas and our ways onto a society in which democracy may not be the best system for them to run off of. Yet like the girl for the con said we have our noses stuck into too many other countries business and it is going to cause more trouble than it will good. The pro side came back to this statement with; well someone has to be the evil so it might as well be us. I strongly disagree with what they had to say about this. The pro side did have a few things that I agreed with such as when they talked about the freedom of our country. The kid from Toronto spoke mostly on this when he said that everyone wants to have freedom like we Americans do. I think this is very true because everywhere you go in the world it seems that either they are happy to see Americans or they are jealous and unhappy to see Americans because of the freedom that we have. The con side had a rebuttal to this as to we are not the only major country that everyone looks up to anymore. The con side said that there are other countries out there that are just as big a player in the world and who have just as much freedom as we do. This is easier summed up by saying that there is an evener playing field now than there was in the past. The pro side’s idea about this was that we were the foundation in which many of these other countries formed on and without us, the countries would not be what they are today. I must say that I agree with what the pro side has to say about this issue.