NYC Letter: One Man's Terrorist Is The Next Man's Terrorist Too

Stephen Jukes, Reuters' global head of news, had a funny idea about words. They should be value neutral. Well this funny idea became something less than funny in Mr. Jukes' application to the real world and the real things that transpire here:

To Reuters, there are no terrorists.

Stephen Jukes...explained his reasoning in an internal memo: "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist. ... To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack."

"We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing field, however tragic it's been and however awful and cataclysmic for the American people and people around the world," Jukes says in an interview.

The average person can easily see where this sort of lexical neutering goes. And goes quickly. But Mr. Jukes is not your average person. For Mr. Jukes the world is a jumble of similitudes where any two people, the one intent on political murder, the other peaceably abiding, both have equal standing for Reuters.

This nonsense was invented by Reuters after the terrorist attacks on the WTC.

And its day is spent.

After decades of argument over whether one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, a group of international "wise men" will this week tell the United Nations to outlaw all terror attacks on civilians or risk losing its moral authority.

Empaneled "wise men" is a distinctly European convention. We expect to meet up with the likes of Socrates, the Bodhisattva, Thomas Aquinas, or Ann Landers, but wind up having to make due with Amr Mousa and Yevgeny Primakov and other lesser Solons.

In a report to be unveiled on Thursday...a panel appointed to reform the UN said it must send "an unequivocal message that terrorism is never an acceptable tactic, even for the most defensible of causes".

This is a slap in the face for Palestinians, Iraqi insurgents, Kashmiri rebels, al-Qa'eda militants and other groups that claim to be fighting foreign domination. It is also a rebuke to Muslim states that have for years blocked agreement on an all-embracing UN convention on terrorism on the grounds that it should exclude groups fighting "occupation" or "colonialism".

Slap. Slap. Slap.

On the question of "resistance" to occupation, the report declares that "there is nothing in the fact of occupation that justifies the targeting and killing of civilians".

Their report's section on terrorism argues that "lack of agreement on a clear, well-known, definition … has stained the UN's image". It attempts to break the logjam by proposing a definition which refers to "any action that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or compel a government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act".

The problem of defining terrorism has dogged the UN since the 1970s and the entry of dozens of countries that had cast off colonial rule, often by force. The report states that the problem is "not so much a legal one as a political one". It adds: "Achieving a comprehensive convention on terrorism, including a clear definition, is a political imperative."

That's disingenuous. Terrorism is not hard to define in its basics. There's nothing extraordinary or over-subtle in the definition assayed by the UN's "wise guys". What has dogged the UN is the UN's tolerance and sanction of terrorism even as it noisily tongue clucks.

So is the UN ready to speak truth to power? Take a deep breath. Now hold it. Hold it. Hold it. ... Yeah, me too.