The Encyclopedia Britannica defines terrorism as "the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective." What distinguishes terrorism from conventional warfare is the degree to which its efforts are focused on creating public panic. While conventional military forces also make frequent use of psychological warfare, including acts of terror and various forms of propaganda, they seek to achieve victory principally through strength of arms.
Terrorists, by contrast, often believe that they cannot win the battle by sheer force of arms because they are fighting a technologically and militarily superior foe. Thus they focus their efforts on covert actions designed to strike the constant fear of unpredictable violence into the hearts of all - particularly civilians. This has led some social scientists to refer to terrorism as the "weapon of the weakest." Attacking civilians has been the methodology, for example, of the thousands of Palestinians who have murdered and maimed Israeli men, women, and children in crowded markets, schools, restaurants, train stations, plazas, nightclubs, and buses, among other places. These terrorists pursue their political goals by striving to make life unbearable for the population at large - and thereby winning political concessions.
In some cases, of course, terrorism is a tool of the mighty - such as when it has been the official policy of totalitarian states like Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Those states used unjustified arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution to create a climate of intense fear, and to encourage subservience to the declared political, social, and economic goals of the state.
In order to attract and maintain the publicity necessary to generate widespread fear, terrorists commonly engage in increasingly dramatic, violent, and high-profile attacks. Toward this end, they often target buildings or other locations that are important economic or political symbols, such as embassies or military installations. Most notable were the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Technological advances in the weaponry of recent decades, coupled with the efforts of terrorist organizations to acquire such arsenals (particularly chemical, biological, and nuclear), give present-day terrorists an unprecedented potential for lethality. Moreover, it is clear that Islamic terrorist groups in particular are willing and eager to use weapons of mass destruction. This was expressed in a 2002 al Qaeda manifesto which candidly declared, "We have not reached [military] parity with them [the Americans]. We have the right to kill 4 million Americans -- 2 million of them children -- and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons . . ."
The term "terrorism" was first coined in the 1790s in reference to the terror used during the French Revolution by the revolutionaries against their opponents. The Jacobin party of Maximilien Robespierre carried out a Reign of Terror involving mass executions. Although terrorism in this usage connotes state violence against its domestic enemies, nowadays the term is used most frequently to describe violence designed to influence government policy or topple an existing regime.
While there is no universal agreement about precise definitions of terrorism, one popular typology identifies three broad classes of terrorism: (a) revolutionary terrorism, which seeks the total abolition of a political system and its replacement with something new; (b) subrevolutionary terrorism, which is aimed not at overthrowing an existing regime but rather at modifying the existing sociopolitical structure; and (c) establishment terrorism (often referred to as state or state-sponsored terrorism), which refers to the measures used by a government against its citizens, against rival factions within the government itself, or against foreign governments or organizations. This form of terrorism was typified by the aforementioned regimes of Hitler and Stalin.
This section of DiscoverTheNetworks focuses most of its attention on the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism, which is the chief enemy of Western civilization today. This brand of terrorism seeks ultimately, by means of jihad (holy war), to create a world dominated by the global rule of Islam. As Middle East scholar Dr. Daniel Pipes explains, "In nearly all cases, the jihadi terrorists have a patently self-evident ambition: to establish a world dominated by Muslims, Islam, and Islamic law, the Shari'a. . . . Terrorists openly declare this goal. The Islamists who assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 decorated their holding cages with banners proclaiming the 'caliphate or death.' A biography of one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of recent times and an influence on Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam, declares that his life 'revolved around a single goal, namely the establishment of Allah's Rule on earth' and restoring the caliphate. Bin Laden himself spoke of ensuring that 'the pious caliphate will start from Afghanistan.' His chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also dreamed of re-establishing the caliphate, for then, he wrote, 'history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world's Jewish government.' Another al Qaeda leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, publishes a magazine that has declared, 'Due to the blessings of jihad, America's countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon,' to be followed by the creation of a caliphate."
