Talk:List of designated terrorist groups/Archive 1

Are the Taliban on the list, or binladin's al queda? There the moset famous terrorist I know.

Yes, absolutely is al-Qaeda on the list. Take another look at the article. It is under 'Al-Qaeda, international'. I don't think the Taliban belongs there, because they consitituted a government that supported or harbored terrorists, which I think belongs in a different category than a list of terrorist groups.

I just added the Black Panthers, they're described as a "revolutionary organization" on their page, but they were certainly concidered "terrorists" by most citizens of the US, so I think it's appropriate. -Guppie


 * Guppie, have a look at the extensive debate on the talk:Terrorism page. I am of the opinion that one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, but there's other people who strongly disagree with that view.


 * Why do the terms have to be mutually exclusive?


 * Because freedom fighters are the good guys fighting against evil opressors, terrorists are evildoers who must be hunted down at all costs. They're two sides of the same coin most of the time, IMHO. --Robert Merkel

-I agree with your view that the same groups can be thought of as freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on your background. I think we should try to categorize terrorist-like groups by their actions, not ideology. The Black Panthers are difficult to categorize, they didn't carry out any obvious terrorist attacks (as far as I know, haven't read too much about them), but they had quite a few armed clashes with the police. That should qualify them as terrorists, although they were not very brutal terrorists, compared to others on the list. -Guppie

I don't think saying they are 2 sides of the same coin is comparing like with like. My point was that one is a method and the other is a, um, job description. It is posible to use terror and violence to achieve the goal of freedom. You can have a terrorist freedom fighter.


 * they had quite a few armed clashes with the police. That should qualify them as terrorists Under what definition does that qualify them as terrorists?  Removing for now, but see below.  DanKeshet, Friday, March 29, 2002

Copied from talk:terrorism:

Even though we aren't contrained in what we can report about criminal activity as the British press and others are, I'm still inclined to think that some formal designation or conviction would be good to have. After all, if someone simply removes "JDL" from the list (as I strongly suspect someone will), we can argue about it ad nauseam and get nowhere, because saying "X is a terrorist" is inherently subjective. But if the text of the article says "Goverment X has designated organization Y as a terrorist group" or "Group X has been convicted of action Y", then they have far less standing to remove such statements, as they can't be reasonably argued--they are clearly true or false. --Lee Daniel Crocker


 * Because of disputes like the one above about the black panthers and the many disputes on talk:terrorism, I think we should adopt this protocol for listing terrorist groups. That way we don't get in 1,000s of arguments about whether X is really a terrorist group. DanKeshet, Friday, March 29, 2002

Do I get to add United States Armed Forces in the list?