Terrorism Is a Distinct Strategy

John Whitbeck’s “Ideology Hiding Behind a Word” (Commentary, March 10) puts forward the premise that “terrorism” is an “epithet” and a term of abuse with no intrinsic meaning. He brings up the old canard that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and says that if the Palestinians had access to F-16s to gain their freedom, they would use them. This ignores a fundamental fact about terrorism: It is a violent attempt to induce political change through attacking specifically civilian populations.

There are other ways to gain peace and liberty, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King both could have attested.

The violence in Israel can be placed cleanly at the feet of Yasser Arafat and his PLO leadership, which rejected Bill Clinton’s attempt to bring peace in late 2000. Arafat could not accept that offer because his and the PLO’s aim is the destruction of Israel.

Osama bin Laden’s murder of innocents at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon cannot go unanswered. Perhaps Whitbeck would prefer that President Bush tell Americans that there is no danger and that we should return to business as usual? Unfortunately, Whitbeck’s claim is as fatuous as the claims of all the other apologists for the wholesale, bloody murder of innocents, and Americans have now awakened enough to reject these opinions based on fantasy.

Brendan P. Dooher

San Ramon

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Whitbeck’s opinion on the war on “terrorism” is shared by many of us who are alarmed at how our president and his administration, in their zeal to protect the world from itself, are slowly leading this country into a “big brother” state on the pretext of fighting terrorism. The liberties that we enjoy as citizens are the backbone of what has made this country unique in all of world history.

Ask the Israelis if their security state has made them any safer. The only true winners I see in this scheme are a burgeoning government bureaucracy and corporations that benefit from spying on and locking up unpopular dissenters, which then will allow the president and his donors to do whatever they want.

Salvador Jimenez

City of Industry

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So Whitbeck believes terrorism is a word with “no intrinsic meaning.” How about this definition: an attack on civilians without any warning, any chance for the victims to defend themselves and usually no self-identification so that the victims are unable to strike back at the perpetrators. A brief look at the history of the subject shows quite plainly that terrorism is without a doubt a real and distinct tactic, one most frequently used by those who want to wage war without suffering the consequences of counterattacks and much less frequently a tactic used by the weak against the strong.

Brian Goss

Long Beach

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The term “terrorism” is properly applied to violence directed toward innocent noncombatants with the aim of creating a general state of terror in the targeted population, as opposed to violence directed against military targets. Whitbeck says that the U.S. uses the term to “assert an absolute right to attack any country it dislikes” and that “no one dares to criticize the U.S. for doing whatever it deems necessary in its war on terrorism.”

Is that so? There have, in fact, been demonstrations in Muslim nations as well as in Europe and on dozens of U.S. college campuses, not to mention newspaper headlines rivaling those that once announced the Normandy invasion accusing the U.S. of “torture” at Camp X-Ray in Cuba. Nothing like the Vietnam antiwar demonstrations, to be sure, but then again, maybe the reason the criticism is muted by comparison is simply that most non-Muslim people around the world happen to agree with the U.S. policy.

This is all bad enough, but Whitbeck doesn’t stop until he hits the ground. In the last paragraph, he accuses the U.S. of suspending “all the rules of international law and domestic civil liberties.” I assume that his excuse for such hyperbole is that he has by now worked himself up into a paroxysm of self-righteousness. I suggest quite a few rewrites, tutoring in critical thinking and a Valium before he again submits something for publication.

Bill Savage

Orange