At first I thought that this was just another case of Muslim baiting so I decided to investigate further by visiting Yvonne's website, specifically her Speech at the 2006 Global Peace & Unity Conference where she said:
"Our greatest shame has been our silence while martyrdom operations ...have been condemned as acts of terror as witnessed in 9/11..."In truth I think these words speak more to the mind of Yvonne Ridley than her public effacing reply to Jane in her radio interview. That's not to say of course that the question wasn't loaded to some extent.
To explain, dead civilians are dead civilians whether the delivery platform is an Israeli M16, a U.S. cluster bomb or a Palestinian freedom fighter with a bomb strapped to his chest. I don't imagine civilians have an opinion about how they are killed except to say that they would in the main prefer not to be. Governments have armies to protect the civilian population against attack from others but these same armies are also well placed to conduct acts of oppression on their government's behalf including the careful filtering of media access to the results of those activities. The oppressed on the other hand are usually poorly resourced and are, for the most part doomed to failure when confronting a well trained and resourced military in a conventional sense.
Subsequently, the oppressed have little choice but to visit their pain and suffering upon the oppressor's civilian population with the aim of subjecting them to the same sense of fear and hopelessness that left unchecked will ultimately catalyse them also to rise up.
Faced with terrorism then, all governments will face the choice of escalating their response to counter any groundswell of public fear and unrest a la Saddam Hussein or choose negotiation with their terrorist opponents as in the case of the Provisional IRA.
Neither solution is palatable to some but accept it or not the oppressed are never going to give up--they have nothing to go back to.
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