During a 2024 raid on an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol, Samuel Corner—a Palestine Action activist—struck police sergeant Kate Evans in the back with a sledgehammer while she was on her knees arresting another activist. She suffered a fractured lumbar spine, was off work for three months, and later had to give up her rank. Corner was convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm and sentenced to seven years and eight months.
Also groups protesting Islamic violence rarely drive their cars through St John’s Wood screaming “kill the Jews rape their daughters” but that’s just my own personal experience.
The US regime is an extremely violent group, so I that's certainly the issue.
More seriously though, there’s no reasonable comparison to be made between any western power and Iran, Russia, or (and especially) Hamas.
October 7th was beyond the pale. Systemic rape, torture, and terror used to be something reasonable people could agree to stand against.
Seriously, sit down, make a list of incidents, including weighing the outcome of those incidents. If it's a case where an officer or a soldier did something wrong, list what happened after (court, punishment, cleared of wrongdoing, etc)
Then do the same for your favorite alternate country that you think is superior. If you want to pick team Iran or Russia, then lay it out for them. Make the same list.
Eight of the shooters were charged with depriving the students of their civil rights, but were acquitted in a bench trial.
I'm not going to make an exhaustive list of all the terrible shit perpetrated by the US government and its agents. It would be too detrimental to my health. But you choosing to bury your head doesn't prove anything either, so I guess I have one up on you.
you would do well to note that this page links directly to an entire wikipedia entry for 'US War Crimes': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
The logic seems to be that Hamas has committed terrorist attacks against Israel, and is also the government of Palestine, so anyone fighting for the human rights of Palestinian people is actually materially supporting Hamas terrorism against Israelis. That does not really track if you know anything at all about what's going on in Palestine right now, or what people's actual criticisms of Israel are.
There's no actual requirement for violence for it to be terrorism.
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Definitions of "terrorism" that extend to sabotage against occupying or invading militaries and their allies are meaningless and hollow dilutions. At that point the discourse has been reduced to something like "violence is scary".
This use is also interesting (and galling) because it frames disarming as an unacceptably violent act.
There are some definitions of terrorism that leave room to designate attacks against professional agents of state violence as "terror", e.g., attacks on soldiers who are off-duty, attacks on civilian police forces, attacks on nominally civilian intelligence organizations like the CIA, etc.
Imo such uses of the words "terror" and "terrorism" should be considered carefully, because sometimes they are meaningful or useful, but often they are essentially attempts to hoodwink the public. Effectively they are designed so that any attack against an occupying army by a faction too weak to muster a permanent standing army of equal strength falls into the "terrorism" category, which means invasion is "war" but resistance is "terrorism".
The notion of "civilian" or "non-combatant" isn't always straightforward, either. In the history of the PKK, for example, one of the "civilian" forces targeted by bombings and shootings were a local militia whose sole purpose was suppressing popular unrest among local Kurdish populations who were forbidden from speaking their own native languages, celebrating their holidays, etc. Formally these militias were not part of an army. But their scarcely concealed function was suppression of the local population, unlike (for example) a proper civilian police force whose role is at least nominally to promote public safety, assist vulnerable (weak, elderly, disabled) citizens with daily life, investigate crimes, mediate/de-escalate disputes, etc.
Anyway, it's worth sitting down and thinking through a few different serious definitions of terrorism and asking yourself what use they are. One or more definitions will likely stand out to you as particularly useful when it comes to thinking through things like the safety of innocents, the morality and bounds of acceptable political activism, and other topics that might directly affect your comfort and safety. You'll often find that governments and large press organizations try to trade on the emotional impact of those definitions while operating under rather different ones that are more convenient for themselves.
This is already an extreme perversion of justice all on its own. Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism. This is simply armed conflict.
> This is simply armed conflict.
Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
Does that include property in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon? Because if the people who spray painted something are "terrorists", I want to know what the people who wiped Rafah off the face of the earth are called.
Terrorism is widely understood to be the deployment of military force against civilian populations. Of course states do this all the time, but 'state terrorism' is basically dependent on whether politicians in country A align with country B or not; if they don't, they'll call out state abuses in country B as state terrorism, if not they'll say it's law and order.
Regardless of these nuances, extending the definition to include any kind of property damage is just laughably opportunist.
"Any kind" is quite the load bearing argument there. Let me remind you Europe is under an ongoing land invasion, which is why fucking with its defensive capabilities is unlikely to solicit much sympathies.
I think it’s worth considering that you’re much more likely to be a resident or a citizen than a state when you’re deciding how you feel about these kinds of things.
Damaging military equipment is a military end, not a political one. If it were otherwise, then a military attacking a military would definitionally be terrorism. At that point, you've removed the utility of the word "terrorism" from English and made it synonymous with "armed conflict."
Terrorism being done chiefly to change policies by terrorizing people through symbolic acts is a constrained, generally-accepted definition of terrorism.
Contrast with 9/11, where symbols of American capitalism, filled with civilians, were attacked in order to terrify people who have nothing to do with those buildings into supporting changes in policy that hurt the US.
Which is typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens…
> you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers,
That's also false, you can absolutely kill unarmed combatants so long as they remain combatants. Eg you can bomb an artillery crew even if they don't have sidearms.
To be eligible for capture, a combatant must generally surrender.
> typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens
I encourage you to read up on POW camps. There are no attorneys or rights. You may work POWs. There are cases in which food and medical aid can be severely limited depending on how it is sourced. You may hold POWs functionally forever.
POWs don’t have attorneys, but they do have rights. Limiting food and medical aid is a war crime.
Of course, everybody routinely violates the rights of POWs, and only the losers ever get prosecuted.
I hope no one takes this seriously.
If you're caught sabotaging equipment on a US military installation in many cases they are authorized to use deadly force and you'll be held accountable under the UCMJ. The absolute best outcome is you're designated a terrorist and live to see a prison cell.
Attacking military targets is somewhere between an insurgency, partisanism, or an armed conflict.
If we let terrorism mean “any act against the state”, then people who burn police cars are the same as people who plant bombs in shopping malls.
Is it not "legitimate" in the same way to kill terrorists?
Corrections welcome if I am wrong.