From a reader (the same one as yesterday):
I think the two distinctions you make are the right ones to make. I doubt that the four necessary conditions in your definition of 'terrorism' are jointly sufficient, but I'm not too concerned about that. [And I didn't claim that they are jointly sufficient, only that they are individually necessary.] I was hoping for a good practical definition and this is as good as I've seen (and better than the ones I offered). If the State Department were to adopt this definition, they would have a good, functional definition that got nearly every case right. It's too bad that you and I both know the State Department as currently staffed and run would never do anything so sane!
BV: Here is the State Department definition:
Title 22, Chapter 38 of the United States Code (regarding the Department of State) contains a definition of terrorism in its requirement that annual country reports on terrorism be submitted by the Secretary of State to Congress every year. It reads:
"[T]he term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents".[53]
That is fairly close to what I said, though I wasn't aware of this definition until just now. I didn't mention premeditation, but that pretty much goes without saying. There are plenty of spur-of-the-moment crimes of passion, but how many spur-of-the-moment terrorist acts of passion are there? But three of my points are covered.
Here's my attempt at a counterexample. Suppose we are in Nazi Germany and suppose further that the Nazi state was not a legitimate one. Thus, in Germany during Nazi rule, there was no legitimate state. I am part of a German underground agency working to overthrow Hitler's regime because I and my agency recognize the Nazis as illegitimate and murderous. My agency is clearly not a state, so I think it meets condition three. My agency and I have a political goal: the overthrowing of the Nazi regime and the establishment of a legitimate government. So, condition one is met.The other two conditions might be a little harder to meet. Suppose I know that Hitler is to give a speech at a rally, flanked by many high ranking Nazis. My agency has found a way to get myself and a few others into the crowd, but we know the Nazis thoroughly check a crowd for guns. Luckily, agent X is an ace explosive maker, and can make explosives out of things that not even the Nazis would suspect. Agent X equips us all with highly explosive cigarette lighters. We want to kill as many of the Nazi brass as we can and this may be the best shot we have. Given the circumstances, we do not have the option of discriminating between the "combatant" Nazis and the civilians who may have just come out of curiosity. We decide it is better to risk killing a civilians who are too close than not take the opportunity. Thus, we seem to meet condition two.The question is whether this counts as an act of sabotage against the Nazis. It certainly involves the killing or maiming of other human beings. And, you might think that sabotage involves acts against legitimate entities, and the Nazis are not legitimate. It seems to me to be more than mere sabotage. But I think someone could reasonably disagree with me about that. If I'm right, then it appears that I'm a terrorist unless we come up with more conditions.
BV: Let us suppose that you count as a terrorist by my definition. Would that be a problem? My definition says nothing about whether terrorism is good or bad, morally permissible or impermissible. It merely states what it is. The original question was whether it is true that most terrorists, at the present time, are Muslims. To answer that question we need a definition of 'terrorist.' On the basis of my definition I would say that, yes, most terrorists today are Muslims. My concern was merely to define the phenomenon. I leave open whether some terrorist acts are morally permissible.
Of course, I consider Muslim terrorism unspeakably evil, from the beheading of Christians, including Christian children, to the attack on Charlie Hebdo, even though I consider the Hebdo crew to be moral scum who misuse, egregiously, the right to free speech, thereby confusing liberty with license. This is why it is is so wrong and indeed moronic for people to stand up for free speech by saying Je suis Charlie. Do they really mean to identify with those people? The way to stand up for free speech is by courageously but responsibly exercising one's right to free speech by speaking the truth, not by behaving in the manner of the adolescent punk who makes an idol of his own vacuous subjectivity and thinks he is entitled to inflict on the world every manifestation of his punkish vacuity.
If someone brings up all the violent drug cartel members in Mexico and Central and South America who 'terrorize' people, assassinate judges, bribe politicians and law enforcement agents, and so on, the answer is that they don't satisfy my first condition inasmuch as they are members of organized crime, not terrorists: they are not in pursuit of a political objective. It is not as if they aim to set up something like a narco-caliphate. They do not, like Muslim terrorists, seek to assume the burdens of governance in an attempt to bring about what they would consider to be a well-regulated social and political order in which human beings will flourish by their definition of flourishing. They attack existing states, but only because those states impede their criminal activities. See Mexican Drug Cartels are not Terrorists.
As for sabotage, I was suggesting that sabotage is not terrorism because terrorist acts are directed against persons primarily, while acts of sabotage are not directed against persons except indirectly. If Ed Abbey urinates into the gas tank of a Caterpillar tractor and manages to disable it, that will affect people but only indirectly. (But what about tree-spiking?) So I would not call you and your cohorts saboteurs.
You are not a terrorist by my definition because you are not indiscriminate in your attack on people: you are not trying to kill noncombatants. What you are doing comes under collateral damage.
The question of Double Effect comes up here as well. See my Israel, Hamas and the Doctrine of Double Effect.