Posted by
InchDeep on Thursday, May 22, 2008 3:03:47 AM
Here are the pull quotes.
"The United Nations has been arguing for 10 years about a definition of terrorism," he said.
"It simply can't agree because of the old cliche that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
"And many G77 countries, developing world countries, argue that
resistance against occupation should not be counted as terrorism.
Western countries say that it should."
Those statements just scream Palistinans killing Israelis. Why the U.N. building should be bull dozed in ocean. They forgot on reason regarding why terrorism has declined, assuming thats true. Our brave boys in the military are killing them every chance they get, God bless them. Here is the story from www.abc.net.au
A new Canadian study has found there's been a sharp decline in the number of people killed by terrorists around the world.
Researchers from the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver have just released a Human Security Brief.
They've looked at three sets of data collected in the United Sates
on domestic and international terrorism and they've found there's been
a drop in the number of civilian fatalities from terrorist attacks.
Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report project, says the
decline is around 40 per cent, based on a review of the three major
data sets in the United States.
Mr Mack says that decline is since 2001 and doesn't include deaths in Iraq.
"Two of these data sets that go back to 1998 aren't really counting
consistently because if they're counting civilian fatalities in Iraq,
of which there are thousands, they should also be counting civilian
fatalities in Africa's civil wars, and they're simply not doing this,"
he said.
But even counting civilian fatalities in Iraq, Mr Mack says there has still been a decline.
"But the decline now doesn't start until 2007," he said.
"And what happens in 2007 is that just as Iraq was driving
casualties up until that point, in 2007 civilian casualties overall
declined radically in Iraq, and civilian casualties from terrorism as
defined by these data sets also declined by about 40 per cent."
That decline, according to the researchers, has coincided with a sharp drop in support for terrorist groups in the Muslim world.
"If terrorist organisations don't have popular support they can't have a popular revolution," he said.
"If they don't have conventional military capability, they can't defeat governments by force.
"So essentially what we can say is that these Al Qaeda-type
organisations, because they've lost so much public support, do not pose
a threat to states; they're certainly not a threat, there's not a
civilisational struggle going on here.
"They are obviously a threat to individuals, but that threat to
individuals is relatively small compared to the threats that we get
from wars or homicides or even traffic accidents."
Mr Mack says the figures on fatalities do depend on how terrorism is defined.
"The United Nations has been arguing for 10 years about a definition of terrorism," he said.
"It simply can't agree because of the old cliche that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
"And many G77 countries, developing world countries, argue that
resistance against occupation should not be counted as terrorism.
Western countries say that it should."