12 Sep 2011
The Free World must not use fear and rage to fight terrorism – Haaretz
A general War on Terror makes no more sense than a general War on Illness.
We all want terror to stop – and we all want illnesses to be vanquished. But anyone who would declare war on illness would be looked at as totally irrational: You can research cancer (actually, many different forms of it), cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, etc. Fighting disease as such is a non-strategy. Each illness must be met on its own ground – and so must each form of terrorism.
What we unify under the name ‘terrorism’ are widely varying phenomena: national liberal movements that turn to political violence are very different from groups like Baader-Meinhoff in the 1970s that have neither territorial demands nor clear political goals.