[WikiEN-l] Terrorism

Tue Jan 20 00:24:23 UTC 2004

Eric Demolli wrote:
>I would suggest to avoid the world terrorist to qualify people. 
>After all people change Arafat was a terrorist Menahem Begin 
>was also a terrorist before being a respected politician. 

If and when the prevailing public perception of a person changes, then we edit 
the article about them to reflect the change. 

>The 9/11 is a terrorist action OBL is responsible for
>several terrorist acts.

Actually I don't like that sentence: We don't know for certain (beyond a 
reasonable doubt) that OBL was the mastermind of 9/11. So juxtaposing '9/11 
is a terrorist action' (a fact as far as the WTC part is concerned) and 'OBL 
is responsible for several terrorist acts' (not sure if this is known for 
certain), leads the reader, IMO, to surmise that OBL is a terrorist and is - 
by implication - responsible for the 9/11 attack. I don't think there is 
enough information for us to imply such a thing. We must therefore attribute 
POVs to their adherents. 

So we could say that the U.S. Justice Department consideres OBL as the number 
one suspect in mastermining the 9/11 attacks and that in the West (especially 
in the United States) he is widely regarded as a terrorist (it would be nice 
to have polls on that, but I don't think they exist). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)