ABSTRACT
A great deal of unnecessary confusion has been created as a result of the mass media, politicians and others using the term terrorism as a synonym for political violence in general. Others seek to ban the word terrorism on the spurious grounds that most of those who use terrorism as a weapon prefer to be called ‘freedom fighters’, ‘holy warriors’ or ‘revolutionaries’, depending on the cause they profess to be fighting for. Some so-called ‘postmodernists’ reject the concept of terrorism on the grounds that it is purely ‘subjective’, implying that there are no independent objective verifiable criteria to enable us to distinguish terrorism from other forms of activity. The public would be justifiably puzzled if lawyers and criminologists ceased to use terms such as ‘murder’, ‘serial murder’ and ‘war crime’ and ‘genocide’ simply because those who perpetrate such crimes regard these terms as pejorative.
