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Eqbal Ahmed: Terrorism – Ours vs. Theirs

Against Amnesia The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror. –Eqbal Ahmed, 1998 [Ahmed though does not explicitly include the state terrorism of Western states. He merely talks about the how US ‘promotes terrorism’, for instance.] From a transcript of a talk by Eqbal Ahmed University of Colorado, Boulder, on 12 October 1998 “By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as 'freedom fighters.' Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, Willi