So if country A uses remotely controlled drones with missiles and use the drones to attack people which they think are hostile to country A and kill them including many innocent civilians, then according to your objective definition country A engages in terrorism? Those attacks instill fear/terror (if you fight against us, you die), it willfully ignores that innocents will die in the attack (you cannot target only targets with explosives) and it is for a political purpose (we want that resistance against our occupation ceases).

@ThorstenS. - the definition includes the word "deliberately" - intent matters. Collateral damage may be bad, it may be undesired, it may be lots of things, but it most certainly does NOT fit the objective definition of terrorism unless the decision is made to inflict AVOIDABLE collateral damage with the goal of terrorizing population. In the latter case, it IS terrorism.

@ThorstenS. - there is a difference between "wilfully ignores" and "is done on purpose". The former is objectively easy to differenciate - if the country A has a choice between less collarteral damage and more collateral damage without affecting efficacy of attack, does it choose more or less option? "more" is terrorism. "less" is not terrorism.

@ThorstenS. - as an example, both US and Israel are often accused of terrorism unfairly despite being on record as REFUSING to attack if there are too many civilian casualties. Israel actually warns civilians in Gaza about upcoming attacks to get out of collateral damage area. So, the intent is to minimize civilian casualties.

@ThorstenS. - let's not even go into the fact that often the root cause of most of the collateral damage here is that the county A's enemy is violating Geneva convention, by stationing military targets among civilian population. So they are the ones whose intent is to inflict civilian casualties.

I thought you wanted to define the term "objectively". Now please explain to me how exactly you can prove "objectively" that someone has an intent to kill people. A malicious force can always claim it was an error, an accident, a misidentification. Oops, someone did run before my rifle. So, how do you objectively prove that an action was terrorism with intent?

@ThorstenS. Usually, terrorists are rather vocal about their wish to instill terror and their wish to do it by targeting innocents.

@ThorstenS. - (1) most terrorist organizations actually CLAIM attacks, with glee. (2) Most state actors have layers of bureaucracy that have official rules of what is and isn't allowed (Israel is a case in point. They have clearly articulated official rules of engagement that explicitly aim to lower collateral damage). (3) Intelligence estimates. You can often analyze and attack and see whether it was designed to inflict civilian casualties, or avoid them.

@ThorstenS. - as an example, if you have a drone attack that happened in area X that resulted in 20 casualties, and half a mile away there's a populated market that could have easily resulted in 200 casualties if attacked, you know it wasn't designed to have civilian casualties. As a matter of fact, the fact that a drone attacked with a small yield smart munition, instead of a carpet bombing run with a wing of B52s, tells you that as well, in a very objective way.

Don't you even recognize how inhumane you are?! You are telling here that you have no problem to kill 20 innocent people if it enables an attack on someone you wish to kill?! If a drone fires and kills an enemy, but the splinter kills with very bad luck your child who coincidentally was in the vicinity, do you want to me believe that you would not get out of your mind for your loss? Do you think other people are different?

@ThorstenS. Well, since you wish for a terrorist who likely will kill far more than 20 people to live (and therefore by refusing to kill him, you have condemned his future victims), I guess you just pronounced an appropriate label for yourself. There is a cost for inaction, and there is a cost for letting bad people keep commiting crimes, much as bleeding hearts fancying themselves "good" refuse to admit it. Orwell said it far better than I could about pacifists, google his quote. Good day.

@ThorstenS. - also, stop twisting my words. I didn't say that 20 people was acceptable. I said that 20 people is evidence that it wasn't the goal to kill civilians, because an easy alternative was 200, if that was the goal.

Pretty good answer! Better without big letters and 2nd person "you", but still good. A sensible concession that terrorist freedom fighters exist. The comments raise other potentially interesting questions as well.

Was Las Vegas murderer Stephen Paddock a terrorist? He appears to have acted alone and to be apolitical (although he might have been following some organization, or inspired by one), and didn't document his intent or write a manifesto anywhere? Was Dylann Roof a terrorist? Was Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev?

@user4012 most state actors [...]have official rules of what is and isn't allowed. That point is moot if the "state actors" have effective immunity when they violate such rules. Since you made a "case in point" of Israel, the answer to soldiers being taped killing unarmed protesters is lack of prosecution, public support from the government, pardons, and laws banning filming soldiers in action (because the problem with soldiers killing unarmed protesters is not soldiers killing unarmed protesters, but "bad PR").

"often the root cause of most of the collateral damage here is that the county A's enemy is violating Geneva convention, by stationing military targets among civilian population. So they are the ones whose intent is to inflict civilian casualties." - That is a complex thing, because the goal here is probably not inflicting civilian casualties (they could just kill the civilians themselves if it was about killing those civilians), but not getting attacked. It is the counterpart to killing civilians in order to also kill that one terrorist - you willfully let collateral damage happen.

"Well, since you wish for a terrorist who likely will kill far more than 20 people to live (and therefore by refusing to kill him, you have condemned his future victims)" - That is a questionable assumption. How many terrorists do you produce by killing dozens of civilians for a terrorist? The war on terror after all has produced more terror, not less.

@Thern - that's not how terrorism works. OBL's biggest complaint wasn't "you killed someone". It was "you stationed your troops in KSA, spreading your amoral Western values". ISIS kills people for not praying the right way, not because they killed someone. If "killing a Muslim civilian" was a measurable cause for someone to choose to attack people, then, by sheer numbers, the FIRST people wiped out in first day would have been ISIS/AQ.etc..., who killed 1000x more innocent Muslim civilians than all Westerners combined.

@smci - as far as I know, FBI did NOT classify Paddock as such, nor offered any political motives, despite searching for any, so no. Roof's stated motives were clearly political, so yes he was a terrorist. Tzarnaev clearly was a terrorist as well under this definition.

"If "killing a Muslim civilian" was a measurable cause for someone to choose to attack people, then, by sheer numbers, the FIRST people wiped out in first day would have been ISIS/AQ.etc..." Well, given the fact that virtually any group in the Syrian civil war could agree on attacking ISIS, and their relatively quick downfall, I think this assumption is quite true. They only survive in states where the goverment has broken down and mountains or deserts shield them quite well from attacks of other groups.

"that's not how terrorism works. OBL's biggest complaint wasn't "you killed someone"." You make the mistake of focusing on the leaders of terrorism. But OBL wasn't an active terrorist himself, at least not in his (in)famous days of being leader of Al Qaeda. He planned terrorist attacks, he legitimated them, but he didn't carry them out, and he was far from dying voluntarily for his beliefs. The execution is done by a completely different kind of people. To put it figuratively: You say that guns are designed to kill in any case. I say that the war on terror produces ammunition, not guns.

@user4012 Terror is a tool, and as a tool it has been used many times by armies. In the 1948 arab-israeli war the israeli forces deliberately spread rumors of massacres, mass rapes and similar war crimes against the palestinian population - and committed several real ones - to force the muslim population to flee and abandon the lands they were planning to occupy. The US military (and every other army) frequently chooses one type of attack or weapon accordingly to, among other reason, its "psycologic" effect - so is, the terror it inspires. Sometimes it's not just combatants they want to scare.

@user4012 They are not necessarily "stationed" among civilians, they arguably are civilians. It certainly isn't the fundamental difference between the Dutch resistance during WWII and say Hamas, but usually one of those groups is called terrorist and the other isn't. That's a damn weak excuse for Israeli terrorism. Some of the things even in generally good documents like the Geneva convention were written with some dubious intent.

@ttbek "Israeli terrorism." I am in general not really consenting with user4012's view on the Middle East, but "Israeli terrorism" is simply wrong. Terrorism needs the intention to kill civilians for spreading fear. Letting civilian casualties happen does not fit the definition of terror, else virtually any war would be terror, and the definition would be moot. You would need to show that the IDF purposely targets civilians even if they could reach their goals differently. That is questionable at best; you can argue that the price is too high, but not that they kill civilians on purpose.

@user4012 "...who killed 1000x more innocent Muslim civilians than all Westerners combined" don't spread lies, that's not true, here's a wiki page mentioning casualties between 2003 and 2011 only in Iraq, not to mention the other wars who occured later (Palestine, Syria...) : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

@DhonJoe - now, if you honestly break down the figures by who was killed by whom and what cause , you will find that US killing Iraqui civilians on purpose was basically a negligible fraction of all the totals. Most civilians were killed either by AQAP and such (proving my point) or by US inadvertently.

@Thern Sniper fire on civilian protesters and the press quite far off on the other side of the security fences to quash any aspiration of protest whatsoever? One couldn't ask for a more literally precise example. There is no plausible deniability left. They do kill civilians on purpose.

@user4012 There is no "US killing Iraqui civilians on purpose" or "not on purpose", when you invade a whole country, don't think that people will just let you do as you wish, you invade a country and you kill thousands of innocent people, and you say it was not on purpose ? are you kidding me ? there is no justifiable reason for that. what makes you different from ISIS/AQ if you start a war, kill innocent people and give whatsoever reason for that ?

"There is no plausible deniability left." - That depends on how critical the situation was on the border fence. If they had to fear that the civilians on the other side would break through the fence and attack the soldiers, it would have been self-defence. If it was killing with the purpose of discouraging any uprising before it could happen, it might qualify as terrorism. I wasn't there, neutral observers were missing, and I don't trust either side to be honest with their reports.

@Thern I really saw a video of Israeli soldier sniping a protester from a long distance while there was no real danger, he even celebrated the kill like he was playing COD, until one of his supervisors told him to calm down and to stay professional... here's one exemple and there is others : edition.cnn.com/2018/04/10/middleeast/video-israeli-sniper-intl/…

@Dhon Joe You are aware that misbehaving of single persons does not prove a larger plan? I can't check the validity of the video, but even if I assume nothing is faked, the reaction of the supervisor shows that such a behavior is not encouraged by official sites.

@Thern The supervisor did not encourage the cheering, not the killing...

@Dhon Joe Because cheering would mean that you want to kill, rather than deem it necessary for self-defence. Note that a much larger number of casualties would easily have been possible if killing was really the intent of the army.

@Thern With all due respect, there already is a large number of casualties everytime, hundreds if not thousands of casualties :)

@Dhon Joe With all due respect, even at this unusually violent incidence the number of casualties was roughly 50, not hundreds or even thousands.

@Thern my ressousrce en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Gaza_border_protests

Yes, but only roughly half of them were civilians, thus arriving at a number of roughly 50. You can't really count shooting on members of Islamic Jihad preparing an explosion, or Hamas fighters firing with AK47s as attacking civilians.

Why is the Israeli situation under such intense scrutiny when there are numerous organizations committing far worse atrocities daily, including state actors?

forget about Israel, that's not the point