UN Relief Chief Martin Griffiths told a representative from Sky News on Wednesday that he did not consider Hamas to be a terrorist group.
Asked about the feasibility of Israel’s military goal to eliminate Hamas and disallow the terrorist group from having any governing say in Gaza, Griffiths responded “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, as you know, it is a political movement. But, I think it is very very difficult to dislodge these groups without a negotiated solution; which includes their aspirations.
“I cannot think of an example offhand of a place where a victory through warfare has succeeded against a well-entrenched group, terrorist or otherwise.”
You never made a case about “terrorist movement” you only went after your own strawman, “terrorism” (as in, the action) - which I hadn’t disputed - and you did so by using a dictionary definition (not a legal one) of a word which is mainly propaganda, hence why per that definition it’s so easy to tag just about any violent action commited by those not in power as “terrorism” - pretty much all revolutions in history against oppressing dictatorships even if mainly peaceful are terrorism by that definition if at any one point “intimidation” was used.
As I pointed, that definition is so bad that Hamas’ actions in the 7th might not have been “terrorism” because it was not commited inside Israel’s UN recognized territory but rather in occupied territory, so it’s not Israel’s law that applies there but rather the law done by that very same Hamas, so their actions were not “unlawful”, hence per that definition were not terrorism.
After all this the point I originally made about “terrorist movement” remains untouched because you never actually provided an alternative definition for what makes something an “movement” about a certain activity.
If we’re going by dictionary definition then a movement is “a series of organized activities working toward an objective” so for Hamas to be a “terrorist movement” it’s objective as an organisation would have to be terror, which does not seem to be the case, but to be an “insurgency movement” its objective would have to be expelling an occupying power, which is most definitelly their objective.
This is the point I was making.
PS: by the way, this whole discussion did made me think properly about all this (so cheers for promoting it!) and I’m starting to think that per the dictionary definition there is no such thing as a “terrorist movement” simply because no group has terror itself as an objective, even though plenty use terror as means to their objective. Since “terrorist movement” is one of those expressions coined way back in the day by politicians justifying their own use of violence, it shouldn’t be surprising that in logic terms it’s bullshit.
Yeah I guess I instinctively defaulted to terrorism because, like you say, “terrorist movement” is a kind of nonsense combination of words