UK Drops “War on Terror” Label
The UK is no longer going to use the “War on Terror” label in reference to efforts to stop terrorist activity.
Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”
The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”
London is not a battlefield, he said.
“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”
Security expert Bruce Schneier lauds the change, saying that “using that language only served to scare people and legitimize the terrorists.”
Also on getting the axe is “Islamic terrorism.” I’m not sure about that one. While I see the point of critics (I’d be annoyed if Timothy McVeigh was called a “Libertarian terrorist”), you can’t get around the fact that many of the world’s terrorists are at least partially motivated by their warped views of Islam. And if there were a bunch of self-proclaimed Libertarians going around murdering innocent people, you can bet your ass that I’d be condemning both their actions and their lack of integrity (initiation of force being unacceptable to Libertarians), so I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Muslims who whine about how they are being disparaged.
