Fascism is one of those words that people routinely apply to most of behavior to disapprove of. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor commented “You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.” But then these are Biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles. So it was presumably God who selected a bunch of Saudi Arabians and Egyptians to punish the United States for its misdeeds against Japanese, Palestinians and South Africans.
Divine terrorism does not really qualify the definition, since God, even when he perpetrates “premeditated, politically motivated violence is not acting as a 'sub-national group or clandestine agent.” He is more of a sovereign Power in his own right as to explain for Jeremiah Wright’s attempt to define the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan as terrorism. It was terrible and terrifying, and it was intended to terrorize the Japanese .people into surrender, but it was not terrorism. Neither are Israeli actions against the Palestinians, even when ten or twenty Palestinians arcing for every Israel victim of Palestinian terrorism and a high proportion of the dead Palestinians are innocent civilians. Israel is a state, so by definition what it does cannot be terrorism.
As per US State Department “Country Reports on Terrorism, is that 6,212 of the terrorist attacks, over two-fifths of all the 14,499 that it records for last year, were in Iraq which might that be connected in some way with the fact that Iraq was invaded by the United States five
years ago and for all practical purposes remains under US military occupation.”
Algerian rebels used similar tactics against French imperial rule, including numerous brutal attacks on innocent civilians. Their tactics were regularly condemned by their targets, but nobody tried to pretend that the world was facing a wave of irrational and inexplicable violence called terrorism.
Bush administration’s entire ‘war on terror’ is the perspective through which the report’s authors want the rest of the world to see the troubles in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, for they cannot be so naive that they truly believe the link between the presence of US occupation troops and a high level of terrorist attacks is purely coincidental. One can see the same perspective at work in the distinction that is made between Israeli attacks on Palestinians (the legitimate actions of a sovereign state) and Palestinian attacks on Israelis (terrorism). Thus US support for Israel is also legitimate; while-Iranian support for Palestinian militants makes Iran the most active state sponsor of terrorism.
Other countries play this game too - notably the Russians in Chechnya -but it are really an American innovation. We all know that the world is facing the terrorism problem. It is very important to root out the causes behind it and work on the causes and not pointing figures at each other. Terrorism sits there as a uniquely wicked and inexplicable phenomenon, while legitimate states and armies can get on with the business of killing people in legitimate wars.