Human Rights and Terrorism



Human Rights and Terrorism

Answer No. 4

International Terrorism is defined as violent activities that produce harm and danger to the life of humanity and clearly violate the criminal laws of USA or any other foreign country. These activities aim at coercing the civil population; impact the policy and procedures of government due to risk associated and also include activities like mass killing, kidnapping etc. (18 USC § 2331, 2013). The definition of international terrorism can be taken in both wrong and right form as this debate is continued over a long period of time.

As per the Murphy, J. F., there have been major disagreements over application and meaning of international terrorism in its context. The primary disagreed issues in this regard include types of crimes that are given name of terrorism, localities, types or kind of victims involved in terrorist acts, and circumstances that led to terrorist acts or after affects of the activities that are forcefully called as terrorist acts. The desirability added to the terrorism's definition could be proved by validity and rational or required justification for taking proximate actions due to nature of domestic or individual based terrorism. The authorities should comprehend the misleading created necessity of terrorism by evaluating the circumstances, level of tolerance, extent of criminal activity, victim's set of mind, and logic behind stating a criminal act as a terrorist act or if it lies under jurisdiction of criminal justice system (1974).

In my opinion Terrorism should be defined as (1) destructive violence or force usually including killing, (2) lower scale in terms of war, (3) with a constitutional and collective ambition such as the goal of an indigenous population with respect to a homeland, (4) not according to national or international law, and (5) prima facie wrong because it is a destructive violence, but not all wrong acts or crimes should be considered as International Terrorism necessarily. The definition certainly includes state-terrorism, considerable amounts of it by the United States in Latin America over decades, and arguably the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

The just decision is to evaluate the crime or act in the light of national or international law. No one can deny from illegality factor associated to terrorist acts but the concept of terrorism is not new. It has been existed from a long time ago. There is terrorism now revered in many national histories, maybe as glorious revolutions. There was terrorism in the understandable and defensible founding of the state of Israel within its original borders in 1948.

There has also been terrorist war, the latter being the same as terrorism in my definition except larger in scale. Its illegality doesn't make it wrong either. But of course it can be wrong. The American and British attack and work with respect to Iraq is of course a recent case of terrorist war, grisly in its hypocrisy and in the effects of its hypocrisy.

In distinguishing terrorism from somehow standard war and the like, it is better than ...