I guess not strictly news - but with all of the vitriol I have seen in discussions on the Israel situation, that have boiled down to arguments over wording, I feel that this take from the BBC is worthy of some discussion.
Mods, feel free to remove if this is not newsy enough.
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Law is not some immutable force. Many countries have laws.
In some of those countries, Hamas is a designated terrorist organization. In others, it is not, and even considered and ally (or has been previously, such as Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Qatar, Syria).
Hamas its self is a government. They have their own laws. So whose laws should we defer to?
The point is that who is or isn’t a terrorist depends on the context and point of view you are speaking from.
There is no universality in that kind of word, and so its appropriate that the BBC isn’t using it.
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I get the emotionalism behind this moment. But words matter. This was a state sponsored effort.
If there is any delineation between a terrorist act and state violence, it should be the existence of a state.
A state exists, Palestine. This was a state action, not a terrorist action. It was an act of open war, but not an act of terrorism. That’s a different thing.
Definitions and words matter. It can’t be “Everything I hate is terrorism”. Look at how the American right has done this with the word ‘fascism’ (largely to obscure their clearly fascistic approaches).
What Hamas did was not an act of terrorism. They have done that previously. This was an act of war.