Difficulty in Defining Who Is a Terrorist

Re “Terrorism’s Silent Partner at the U.N.,” Commentary, Oct. 19: Joshua Muravchik accuses the United Nations of condoning terrorism by failing to oppose it unequivocally: Everyone, he says, “understands what terrorism is: the deliberate targeting of civilians.”

His definition is crudely simplistic. If we accepted it, then Israel has used terrorism in killing Palestinian civilians and bulldozing their houses; and there are reports that U.S. forces killed many civilians in their attacks on Fallouja. We condone the killing of civilians by calling it collateral damage. There is no easy definition of terrorism, which is why the U.N. had such difficulties in coming to a resolution.

Reginald Foakes

Santa Monica

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Muravchik very ably makes the case that terrorism is the deliberate killing of innocents and is never, ever justified. No one with an ounce of humanity would argue against this premise. But what he, like so many other intelligent people, ignores is that virtually every major conflict since World War I has involved the deliberate killing of innocents by both sides, either to hasten surrender or as retaliation; it is the inevitable result of war.

It would seem reasonable to conclude that the real culprit (the real terrorist) is the one who initiates the violence, particularly when the initiator is sufficiently powerful to resolve the conflict by other means. In both Palestine and Iraq there is clearly deliberate killing of innocents by both sides. To identify the true terrorists, we need only ask: Who initiated the violence? In Palestine the answer is very murky; in Iraq it is not.

Jim Parkhurst

Long Beach

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Muravchik, in blindly and unilaterally assailing the Islamic states in the U.N. for terrorism, somehow manages to live on a planet where U.S. and British bombing of civilians in Iraq is not a form of state-sponsored terrorism. How incredibly naive.

Here on Earth, governments in the East and the West alike utilize the tactic of terrorism to suppress us proles in as many ways as George Orwell could possibly imagine. It’s a big world, and membership in the U.N. requires one to bring his best game to the diplomatic arena. If the only competence in the current U.S. diplomatic mission is the ability to hypocritically whine, it’s time that it be replaced.

Tony Pereslete

Culver City