Who is a terrorist?
Is it someone
who would use
old men in underpants
as human shields,
to proceed soldiers into buildings
so that they might trigger booby traps
and draw the fire of snippers?
And to then execute them,
leave them like offal
amongst the rubble,
once their usefulness is served?
Is it someone
who would intercept
a load of pagers,
fill them with explosives
and detonate them,
without warning,
without concern as to those present,
with the intent of causing
death and injury,
lost fingers, hands, and eyes
42 dead
then boasting about it?
Is it someone
like Daniel Raab,
flying halfway around the world
to shoot unarmed civilians
retrieving corpses of their family members,
treating love and grief as cause to kill,
and acknowledging that they knew
that their victims were unarmed,
no threat to them,
bragging that “he bent down to take him, and I shot one bullet and hit him in the head”
and adding “…it also doesn’t really interest me”?
Is it someone
who would kill 15 paramedics
driving clearly marked ambulances
and then burying the bodies
and the mangled ambulances
in an impromptu mass grave
ploughed over by bulldozers?
Is it someone
who brags “we’re very powerful.
This country is very powerful.
It’s far more powerful than people understand.
We have weaponry that nobody has any idea what it is,
and it is the most powerful weapon in the world that we have.
More powerful than anybody even, not even close”
and brags of supplying
their powerful weapons to their allies
who “use them very well”
and who themselves uses their power
to bomb fishing boats?
Who is a terrorist?
Is it not whomever it is convenient to so label?
It is someone
who does or threatens to do to us
what we do or have done to them.
It is never our ally.
Never our trade partner.
Never those from whom we buy weapons.
Never those who look like us.
Never those who are useful to us.
So that Ahmed al-Sharaa
is now an ally
even though al-Qaeda and al-Nusra linked.
And ISIS linked Moumen Al-Natour
is a US and Israel ally.
And Palestine Action are
proclaimed terrorists
for opposing arms sales,
disrupting commerce and surveillance on behalf of a genocidal ally.
Definitions are fluid
Orwellian
Allegiances changing without comment
Enemy to friend to serve a purpose.
Definitions as malleable
as the lie
conveniently requires.
Che Guevara was right!
One man’s terrorist
is another man’s freedom fighter.
To the oppressor,
Anything he does against us marks him always as a terrorist.
To those he seeks to liberate
he is a freedom fighter.
Che was also correct that
“To execute a man
we don’t need proof of his guilt.
We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.
It’s that simple”
And we never question our right to do so.
We and our allies
can do as we please.
But if others do the same
or threaten to do the same
to us
then they are terrorists,
even if they are just
old men in underpants.
