Double standards?
They have the cake and the knife with which to cut it as they please. They define events and the words with which to express them. They say, «This is terrorism, this is war.» And we listen. We saw our heads of state paying tribute to the thousands of innocents on September 11, our clerics holding memorial services and condemning the perpetrators. What happened in New York was terrorism, not war. When Israelis kill Palestinians with phosphorus bombs, it is war, but when Palestinians blow themselves up in mortal attacks on Israelis – that’s terrorism. Those in power have the cake and the knife, but also fear. We all saw the panic of our ostensibly socialist government when a man on trial for multiple murders and robberies tried to wrest away the latter’s influence over the use of language by saying he had taken «political responsibility» for the crimes of his organization, adding that his own actions were not crimes, as they were committed in the name of Socialism. He offered his own definitions of «politics» and «terrorism.» Panic-stricken, the party state tried to claim back power with a shower of propagandistic rhetoric. But their challenger’s logic was impeccable: His group’s activities were as political in nature as those of earlier communist rebellions that our Socialist governments have been praising for 20 years and whose perpetrators entered Parliament without first being punished as criminals. Today’s «revolutionary» murderers want the same treatment.
