Terrorism is not about terror

Biggest problem with analyzing terrorism is in the definition. Classifying both Hezbollah and al-Qaeda as terrorist groups means that you have spread the definition for any group that may have bombed civilians at some time or another. I would claim that Hezbollah is much more than terrorist group. Their success or failure does not depend on terrorism. Second bias might be exclusion of successful terrorism that is later legitimized. For example, are IZL and Stern Gang included? I would say…

Kill One, terrorize a thousand - Sun Tzu. Wistful meanderings in to pop-sociology aside, terrorism is a component of general guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare itself is a valid and often very successful strategy to winning a conflict where there are vast resource and power projection differences between combatants. Two episodes in US history are pretty accurate portrayals of this - the American Revolution and the Vietnam War. Terrorism's number one use is still simply a tactic of a regional conflict…

I do agree with most of what is said there, but it misses out terror groups like the KKK, that WERE about terror, and achieved (successfully) their aims through terror. They aided and caused the oppression of black people by carrying out a number of lynchings which left the wider black (and whites who might aid the black cause) community afraid of breaking the status quo. This was a special case as the terror group was widely in bed with…

Terrorism is about finding an "in" group. How do you combat this? My favorite quote about how the internet impacts terrorism: "If we see terrorism as more of a tribal or gang activity than political activism or warfare, then online connections become especially important to our analysis, otherwise we will be fooled by so-called lone wolves. Earlier ‘lone wolves’ like bombers Timothy McVeigh or Eric Robert Rudolph turn out on closer inspection to have ties, social & otherwise, to like-minded…