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.