question: what's the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter?

[ourbluenation]

I am sincerely wondering.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

1. easy

which side of the conflict are you on? that is all you need to make a decision...

sP

[slackmaster]

2. Because the higher it goes, the faster it spins

:argh:

[ixion]

3. The government who is doing the labeling

and not much more, really.

[dipsydoodle]

4. The perception

of an outsider.

[Cerridwen]

5. A freedom fighter is "us" A terrorist is "them" n/t

[NNadir]

6. The media. There's also "gov't forces" and "insurgents," "troops" and

"militants."

Actually I think we've been pretty militant in invading Iraq, but no one ever calls us "militants."

[cali]

7. It's not a very useful term n/t

[ourbluenation]

8. Looked it up in the dictionary...

freedom fighter
n.

One engaged in armed rebellion or resistance against an oppressive government.

terrorist

adj : characteristic of someone who employs terrorism (especially as a political weapon); "terrorist activity"; "terrorist state" n : a radical who employs terror as a political weapon; usually organizes with other terrorists in small cells; often uses religion as a cover for terrorist activities

[datasuspect]

13. per malcolm x (the movie)

brother malcolm (as played by denzel washington): "who wrote that book? that's a white people's book" (goes to front page of websters dictionary and it shows pic of a white man).

the guy who portrayed the muslim brother who brought him to islam while in prison: "it sure ain't ours."

[atreides1]

14. Read this little bit of history

It all depends on your perspective


The King David Hotel bombing (July 22, 1946) was a bombing attack against the British government of Palestine by members of Irgun —a militant Zionist organization.

The Irgun, dressed as Arabs, exploded a bomb at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which had been the base for the British Secretariat, the military command and a branch of the Criminal Investigation Division (police). 91 people were killed, most of them civilians: 28 British, 41 Arab, 17 Jewish, and 5 other. Around 45 people were injured.

The attack was initially ordered by Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun, who would later become Israeli Prime Minister. The attack was commanded by Yosef Avni and Yisrael Levi.

The attack on the hotel was the deadliest attack against the British in the history of the Mandate. Some claim this act should be considered in light of the escalating violence in the region and the conflict between the three main forces in the region: British, Jewish and Arab. In particular, the attack was made in retaliation for the British mass arrests (Operation Agatha) of June 29 1946, when British troops raided the Jewish Agency and confiscated large quantities of documents, such as information about Jewish Agency operations, including intelligence activities in Arab countries. At about the same time, more than 2,500 Jews from all over Palestine were placed under arrest. A large number of seized documents were taken to the hotel. However, the bomb attack had already been planned


Now was this the act of "freedom fighters" or "terrorists"?

[rurallib]

9. depends on which side of the conflict your on

Menachim Begin was a hero and a freedom fighter to the Zionists and a terrorist to the British.
What is really funny is that after the fighting is done the "terrorists" often become the government and as such often will deal with their adversary in the international stage.
For example - US & Britain, Communist Vietnam & the US.

[ourbluenation]

10. IRA and Sinn Fein

[Little Star]

11. In todays world there are no freedom fighters.

You are either a government run military or you are a terrorist, ask the media. Now, if the north koreans established freedom fighters, that would be a different story.

[no_hypocrisy]

12. I suppose that the American colonialists were considered to be

"terrorists" by the monarchists before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. At one time, the colonialists were a disenfranchised group of militias, without sovereignty, without a land, and without a government. The label ultimately depends on historical hindsight; a contemporaneous moniker depends upon an aggregate of destructive actions on civilians and the amount of violence inflicted.

[slackmaster]

15. Yes, but that's not a blanket justification for complete moral relativism

Some acts, like blowing one's self up in a crowd fo innocent people, are just plain wrong.

[ourbluenation]

18. or bombing a building of people to get one guy.

[Clark2008]

16. Nothing.

It all depends upon which side you're on.

[leftofthedial]

17. your point of view

and the political aims of the person or group in question.


"terrorist" has become a meaningless term. It is a bucket in which those in charge of protecting the status quo dump their enemy du jour.

[Igel]

19. Objectives, targets, and methods.

In short. There's more to be said, but making the matter fuzzy is that freedom fighters can lapse into terrorist methods, and terrorist groups can grow to become actual insurgencies.

One can produce examples of prototypical chairs and prototypical freedom fighters, of prototypical stools or sofas and of prototypical terrorists. One can find people transitional between freedom fighters and terrorists, where they don't fit neatly into either category. Hence people can push terrorists, with a negative connotation, into the category 'freedom fighter'. "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

But one can also easily find chairs that are sofa-like, or stool-like, and it's hard to know what term to use. One can play the exact same kind of language game with these words, because there are transitional forms of butt-support. And a good deconstuctionist can triumphantly cry out that there *is* no difference between a sofa and a chair, or a chair and a stool, and therefore no difference between a sofa and a stool. "One man's sofa is another man's stool!"

Sounds silly, doesn't it? But it's only plausible in the case of terrorists/freedom-fighters because people can't be bothered to question motives and methods and produce some sort of generally acceptable prototype-based definition--and we're only talking about words, after all, devoid of any actual consequence for us, in our air-conditioned liviring rooms--while in the case of stools, chairs and sofas there's an actual, important, non-ideological difference. Dammit, our asses are at stake.

But a more serious problem is that nobody wants to question whether the Taliban, when they claimed to bring freedom, really did. Freedom is a cultural value, right? After all, the Taliban's imposition of freedom on the Hazara was in no way different, really, from Washington's imposition of freedom on New York. Viewed from the right perspective.

[malaise]

20. There is no difference

According to Bushco Mandela is retired terrorist. Oh Fugg Bushco.