Note
Starting today, a UN committee of all interested member states takes up - again - the issue of drafting a comprehensive convention against terrorism. The job was first assigned by the General Assembly over a decade ago. The stumbling block? In the words of the drafting committee coordinator: "Despite the substantial attention that had been paid to the issue of terrorism by the international community, agreement on what exactly constituted terrorism still did not exist..." Or as the coordinator has most recently described the position of the members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation: "...the need for a clear legal definition of terrorism, which distinguished terrorism from the legitimate struggle of peoples fighting in the exercise of their right to self-determination, had been emphasized. It had been further asserted that the draft convention could, if properly conceived, address elements such as the root causes of terrorism..." In other words, a decade after 9/11 the UN world still cannot define terrorism, because Islamic states believe that killing selected individuals in the name of self-determination is not terrorism. They don't name their victims at the UN, but no one doubts they mean Americans and Israelis or other Westerners that are deemed "legitimate" targets.