No, it's not a scare tactic. The point of it is to actually find terrorists. And the Israelis are hardly "tearing down a whole town" just for the heck of it...the towns get destroyed because militants hide in the houses and shoot at the Israelis. There are also forms of collective punishment employed, like blowing up the houses of suicide bombers' families, but neither is that terrorism.

Not every punishment is terrorism.

 

Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
--FBI Definition

By the definition our government uses, both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are guilty of terrorism. Except that Isreal says it's not illegal to do what they're doing. So they say it's not terrorism. Like I said before; if you have a formal gov't on your side, nothing is terrorism, while if you are independant of a gov't, everything is terrorism.

 

No, it's not that clear cut, but having a formal government helps because things have to happen by political process to some degree. And, yes, the Israelis do claim that what they are doing is not illegal and they have an argument with some merit; they're not dropping bombs on schools and then saying "Arafat leave or we'll blow up another school." They target militants, sometimes recklessly, but nonetheless that's where the strikes go. Contrast that to the palestinian suicide bombers, who, while sometimes attacking Israeli soldiers, tend to go for soft targets...like a bunch of kids and women waiting at the bus stop.

 

On a slightly different topic...getting back to how America commits terrorist acts...isn't our embargo of Cuba terrorism? We use force (economic force) to try to sway their gov't and people to be not communist (a political and social objective).


Oh that's right...UNLAWFUL force or violence...hahahahaha

 

Imagine a world....
http://homepage.mac.com/duffyb/nobus...heater145.html

 

That's actually a very good example of what I'm talking about. Whether you believe the embargo is wrong or not, it's a silly use of the word terrorism to apply it to an economic embargo against a dictator. It would be like, as I said earlier, saying that germany is a terrorist state because it threatens criminal punishment for pro-**** speech.

 

Good response. At least this site is funny. Your anti-semitic one was just offense AND it was idiotic on top of that.