I saw an interesting definition of terrorism.

Context
I'm reading Vengeance, by George Jonas. It's the book that inspired the movie Munich. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I want to. Anyway, Jonas gives this definition of terrorism, which he got from the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism: the deliberate, systematic murder, maiming and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear in order to gain political ends.

Commentary
You know, I think that's a definition of terrorism everyone can agree with except, of course, terrorists. In my experience, no one ever deliberately murders innocents. If I decide you should die, I don't consider you innocent. From what I understand of al Qaeda, the adherents believe in two classes of people: those who don't follow their religion, which makes them enemy combatants, and those who do, which makes them fellow combatants. Cute trick, huh? No innocents, because everyone's involved.

The Jordanian response to a hotel bombing in their country indicates that some people have decided they are innocent, and do not want to be involved. If enough people in the Middle East start to feel this way, al Qaeda loses a big chunk of its recruiting pool, which would make many of us unwilling enemy combatants very happy.

Americans might be tempted to feel morally superior at this point. "Jordanians only started caring about this war when their own people got hurt!" Not so fast there, Sparky. Many people who might have been considered innocent were killed in the Vietnam war, a la "we had to destroy the village in order to save it," and certainly there were plenty of people protesting those kinds of actions. However, the tide didn't really turn against our involvement until the shootings at Kent State. You know, "our own people."

The situations are not completely parallel by any means. But I think they have one aspect in common: they were both eye-openers.

What did you see today?