>>Muslims worldwide are the main perpetrators of terrorism

if terrorism is violence against civilians, go add up the number of civilian victims of (mostly western, mostly american) state violence in the last 60 years then tell me who are 'the main perpetrators of terrorism'. a painful and humiliating fact, as you say.

According to the american government's own statistics there is less terrorism now than at any point over the last 40 years (i.e. since the american government started collecting statistics on terrorism). Added to this, in britain you are more likely to die falling off a ladder than you are of terrorism.

 http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=576464&section=news
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"Fri 3 September, 2004 13:27

Most terror convictions non-Muslim

LONDON (Reuters) - Muslims are more likely to be arrested under tough anti-terrorism legislation, but actual conviction rates are higher among non-Muslims, according to a study.

The findings are further evidence that police are unjustly targeting the Muslim community, according to Muslim organisations.

For its study, the Institute of Race Relations was able to examine details of nearly half the 609 arrests in the country using anti-terror legislation in force since the U.S. attacks of September 11, 2001.

Of those 287 arrests, 199 were Muslims, 25 were non-Muslims, and the religious background of 63 were unknown.

But when it came to court convictions, the Muslims were in a minority.

"The facts show that most convictions secured in an open court under the 2000 and 2001 Terrorism Acts have been of non-Muslims," the study published on Friday said.

The institute was able to look at 11 of the 15 convictions under anti-terrorist laws since September 11 and found only three were Muslims.

Six convictions were for offences related to banned Loyalist groups from the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.

Other non-Muslim convictions include one for an abusive letter containing white powder sent to the office of Muslim Member of Parliament Mohammad Sarwar.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission said the report's conclusions were not surprising.

"This just confirms overwhelming reports highlighting the fact that Muslims are being unjustly targeted" said chairman, Massoud Shadjareh.

A Home Office spokesman acknowledged concerns but denied terrorism laws were aimed at any specific race or group.

"We don't see the Muslim community as a threat," he said.

Friday's report lists cases in which arrests of Muslims have not led to convictions.

These include a group of 10 Iraqi and North African men who were detained in April on suspicion of involvement in a plot to bomb the ground of soccer club Manchester United. The men were released without charge after eight days of questioning, and later revealed to be ardent supporters of the club."
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This bloke al-Rashed of Al-Arabiya should be commended for attempting some self-criticism. But it's quite wrong for him (or whoever wrote the headline) to say "All the World Terrorists are Muslims!". Even by the brainless legal definition of "terrorism" (meaning any kind of militant without a uniform), this is obviously untrue. Count in all the "terrorists" operating in Colombia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, etc. etc., and the count looks a bit different. How about also counting in all the unarmed groups that Ashcroft and Freeh call "terrorists": Reclaim The Streets, Earth First.... not many Muslims in there.

And as another poster above said, count in all the millions killed by terrorists in uniform, and you're looking at a new headline that says "Most Terrorists Are Christians!"

Just wanted to say, I post on indy as jim quite regularly so just in case anyone thinks it's me that stuck this hogwash up here then it wasn't. erm. well that's it really.

The last time I checked the United States was the perpetrator of most terrorist incidents, invasions, etc. America and it's agent provocateur IsraHELL are the cause of these terrorist incidents.

Sorry to interrupt, but didn't I hear yesterday that there was no evidence that any of the hostage-takers were either Arab or African? Otherwise sneaking out during the seige might have been more tricky. Remove race/religion from the equation (always a divisive move) and those responsible were...Chechens.

That's a little simplistic - I haven't seen any sources that have suggested there were no Ingush involved, and there's still little consensus in the reporting, e.g. many sources have claimed hostages saw older children being raped, others make no mention.

There's a good summary, aknowledging the uncertainty, at  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3627586.stm - Arabs are prominently involved in the Chechen confict, but there are conflicting reports about the involvement of Arabs in the siege.

The above article suggests (from information given by Ruslan Aushev, the former Ingush leader who negotiated with the hostage takers) that NONE of them are Chechen.

That the hostage takers are Islamists is more difficult to dispute, as Chechen rebels are fighting not just for Chechen independence, but for an unpopular Sharia dictatorship across Chechnya, Ingushetia etc. They selected Northern Ossetia as a target almost certainly because it is one of the few majority Christian Orthodox areas in the region.

In my opinion, it's important that we all try to aggregate the various pieces of information coming out of this atrocity and make a decision based on the facts alone. No source I've seen has even come close to suggesting the perpetrators weren't Islamists, and most Muslims around the world are absolutely outraged that the hostage takers claim to belong to the same religion as them.

Don´t you cynics realise,

If you murder civilians whilst wearing a militiary uniform, or you bomb them from miles away in a modern, expensive plane, or happen to be white, then IT´S NOT TERRORISM!!!

Muslims are the main perpetrators of terrorism because you have to be brown to be a terrorist, its the definition in the US dictionary. Or Irish...

I think you have to bring the question back to, exactly how many civilians has the US killed in its wars, compared to those killed by ´terrorism´. Afghan civilian casualties easily exceeded the number of US civilians killed on 9-11. So don´t bother trying to post such bullshit up here, it doesn´t fool anybody.

War in Afghanistan:

TROOPS KILLED: 8,000 (May 2003)
TROOPS SERIOUSLY INJURED: 24,000 (May 2003)

CIVILIANS KILLED: 3,413 (Feb. 2004)
CIVILIANS SERIOUSLY INJURED: 6,143 (Feb. 2004)

And now Afghanistan is in complete chaos, with the Warlords back in power, and even medicin sans frontier having to leave the country because of lack of safety.

I take your point Hermes, but terrorism has always been defined as a sub-state activity, a more personal act than warfare - terrorists are individuals acting in a common cause, rather than state 'activity'.

I think you could mount a convincing argument that so called 'black ops' come closest to the neologist phrase 'state terrorism' but you also have to recognist that in normative terms (historically, anyway) 'state terrorism' is a contradiction in terms.

Still, the assassination of Patrice Lamumba, for example, almost certainly at the behest of the US, could definitely be called state terrorism. I'm sure we can all think of examples before and since. But someone killed Lamumba, and 'the US government' doesn't cut it. Someone pulled the trigger, someone with a name.

No one with sense thinks that Islamist terrorism is the result of Islam, despite the 'Islamic packaging' the media likes to emphasise. The exact motivation of Islamist terrorists is still being debated (although it's generally recognised that there's enough homogeneity in their motivation to suggest a common cause, whether in Chechnya, Kashmir, the Phillipines, Thailand - Palestine is much more complex).

My point is, if you equate American nationalism with Islamist terrorism, it's easy to sit back and conclude it's nationalist rivalries, or colonialism, or some other abstraction that doesn't get to the heart of the problem.

Terrorism is related to resistance, which is why state terrorism is a contradiction. If you lose the distinction between violent resistance and repressive state violence, there's an equality between the two that belies the fact that one compensates for a position of weakness, and one takes advantage of a position of strength.

>>terrorism has always been defined as a sub-state activity, a more personal act than warfare - terrorists are individuals acting in a common cause, rather than state 'activity'.

what 'has always been' is a propaganda definition of terrorism which exonorates the state -- +our+ state and the states of our friends -- in its use of violence against civilians. 'normative terms' mean nothing when academia has failed so miserably to challenge the orthodoxy or when it is emotion and ignorance which govern readers of the popular press. are you really so capable of misunderstanding the significance of the language? 'terrorism' = them / bad, 'war' = us / good. there are only differences of scale and differences of how acts are reported. the murder of populations by the agents of american foreign policy - a policy supported by the uk - is, to me, terrorism. denial of this is exercised only by the self-serving.

Semantics... exactly. Calling something terrorism because you want to say that certain state actions are immoral makes as much sense as throwing around the word 'fascism' simply because you happen to disagree with someone's point of view. We're discussing the use of a word, aren't we? If that's not semantics, what is?

My point - look again at what I wrote - was that semantics are less important that the actions the word refers to, and that the word 'terrorism' shouldn't be applied for disingenous reasons.

Calling state crimes terrorism is facile and nonsensical. The heart of the argument is whether acts of resistance should be called terrorism, not whether acts of resistance should be equated with the excesses of imperialism.

So if a bomb falls from a very expensive taxpayer-subsidised fossil fuel-guzzling flying machine and blows up a market place full of innocent civilians, thats merely 'war'.

But if the bomb was strapped to a crazy/brown/bearded/'other' person, thats Terrorism!

The semantic distinction only exists because States insist their violence is legitimate. There is still a distinction between repression and terrorism; the former would be say Pinochet's 'dissapearing' of opponents or the 'Miami Model' policing in the US, the latter would be say the bombing of the Al Shifa pharmaceuticals plant or 9/11 (whoever did it). To accept that 'state terrorism' is a contradiction in terms is to accept the fatuous argument of there being 'no moral equivalence' between a homocidal poor guy and a homocidal rich guy, when homocide is homocide.

It's true that not all state war crimes are terrorism. But some clearly are.

The bombing of Baghdad in the initial stages of the US invasion was done to create "shock and awe". Is there really any difference between bombing for "shock and awe", and bombing to terrorize?

The true significance of acts like this, and of acts like the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is that their terrorist purposes greatly exceed any purely strategic military advantage of the techniques used.

In the latter cases, there's a strong argument for the idea that terrorizing the Japanese into surrender was secondary, even redundant: the real audience was the USSR. By demonstrating that "we, your opponents, are a little bit mad", the US can throw uncertainty on ordinary plans for any military actions against it as a rational adversary.

A good essay on state terrorism can be found here:
 http://www.cappe.edu.au/PDF%20Files/Primoratz1.pdf

Interesting debate, although I think many posters werent reading Big Vs post properly and seeing that he was coming down even harder on state terrorism than on individual terrorism, and criticising unnecessarily. Youre so agressive, you lot...

1 muslim cleric calls muslims the biggest perpetrators of terrorism. Well, not so long ago, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ALL AROUND THE WORLD, marched to denounce the US war as the biggest perpetrator of terrorism, and in New York, hundreds of thousands of US citizens denounced the US as the global terrorist.