What is terrorism?

One of the things that struck me about the presentation of the news of the atrocity at Mumbai was the way the po faced newsreaders at the BBC and some of their guest commentators as well as certain newspaper outlets around the world strained to identify the murderers as "miltants" when clearly they were perpetrating acts of unrestrained terror on their victims. Tom Gross asks - If this Isn't Terrorism, What Is?

Australia's own village idiot John Pilger has a different view of terrorism. The real terrorists are the British as he points out in the Guardian -

STORED in the great British libraries, unclassified official files tell the truth about British policy and human rights, from officially condoned atrocities in the concentration camps of colonial Kenya to the supply of biological weapons to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. As we hear the moralising drone of ex-British military "security experts" telling us what to think about current events in Mumbai, we might recall Britain's historic role as midwife to violent extremism in modern Islam, from the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s through the overthrow of Iran's liberal democratic government to MI6's arming of the Afghan mujaheddin, the Taliban in waiting.

Thanks to the Australian we know that the apologetic Pilger, wrote on 13 September 2001 in Britain's New Statesman:

FAR from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims; that is, the victims of American fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.

A more logical voice is that of Melanie Phillips who writes in The Daily Mail:

IT is not "our" fault; it has nothing to do with Muslim poverty, oppression or discrimination. The Islamic fundamentalist fanatics use specific grievances - Kashmir, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya - merely as recruiting sergeants for their worldwide holy war against all "unbelievers". The Mumbai attackers targeted British, American and Indian citizens simply because they wanted to kill as many British, American and Indian unbelievers as possible. Where they found Muslims, they spared them. They also singled out for slaughter the occupants of the Chabad House, a pious Jewish outreach organisation with no Israeli or political agenda, underscoring the point that at the core of the Islamists' hatred of Israel festers their hatred of the Jews.