INTRODUCTION:
The history of mankind is replete with tales of horror of some power-wielding humans going mad, while others have been the victims of their unimaginable brutalities. The perpetrators have ranged from individuals to armed groups to states. The systematic use of terror as a means to attain political objectives exists all over the world.
The attention we give to terrorism often seems disproportionate to its real importance. Terrorism incidents make superb copy for journalists, but kill and maim fewer people than road accidents. Nor is terrorism politically effective. Empires rise and fall according to the real determinants of politics – namely overwhelming force or strong popular support – not according to the bit of mayhem and pandemonium caused by isolated fanatics whom one would take seriously enough to vote for it. Indeed, the very variety of incidents that might be described as Terrorism has been such as to lead critics to suggest that no single subject for investigation exists at all. Might we not regard terrorism as a king of minor blotch on the skin of an industrial civilization whose very heart is filled with violent dreams and aspirations. Who would call in the dermatologist when the heart itself is sick?
But popular opinion takes Terrorism very seriously indeed and popular opinion is probably right. For the significance of Terrorism lies not only in the grotesque nastiness of terrorist outrages but also in the moral claims they imply. Terrorism is the most dramatic exemplification of the moral fault of blind willfulness. Terrorism is a solipsistic denial of the obligation of self-control we all must recognize when we lived in civilized communities.
Certainly the sovereign high road to misunderstanding Terrorism is the pseudo-scientific project of attempting to discover its causes. Terrorists themselves talk of the frustrations, which have supposedly necessitated their actions, but to transform these facile justifications into scientific hypothesis is to succumb to the terrorists’ own fantasies. To kill and main people is a choice people make, and glib invocations of necessity are baseless. Other people living in the same situation see no such necessity at all.

HISTORY OF TERRORISM:

Terrorism is not a recent phenomenon. The Zealots employed it against the Roman occupation in Palestine. The Assassins used it in eleventh and twelfth centuries in Persia and Syria. The Thugs in India used it for many centuries against innocent travelers to appease the bloodthirsty goddess Kali. Terrorism became an important feature of European politics during and after the French Revolution as different political groups comprising anarchists, nationalists and social revolutionaries practiced assassinations, bombings and various forms of violent seizure and destruction of property.
Terrorism has become the greatest evil in our worlds today. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life. Although the international community remains divided a universal definition of what is meant by terrorism, yet it remains committed to confront it through a variety of means.

WHAT IS TERRORISM?

In the present scenario, the terrorism is being successfully tackled by the United States and its allies who have declared War on Terrorism. If we ponder upon the word Terrorism, it’s a relative term, which takes on a different meaning if we change its context. Terrorism has no absolute and globally accepted definition and its interpretation can easily be used or abused to suite particular needs. The adage that “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” reveals the wide range of variations in its interpretation but, if simply stated, terror is extreme or intense fear. It is a psychological state, which combines the physical and mental efforts to create dread and insecurity. The matter of terrorism is complicated. The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today and the hero of yesterday is the terrorist of today. This is serious matter of constantly changing world in which we have to keep our heads straight to know what is terrorism and what is not. But most importantly to know what causes it and how to stop it. The present terrorism scenario is very closely related with Islam.

GLOBALLY ACCEPTED DEFINITIONS:

On December 6, 2001, Justice Ministers of the 25-member European Union adopted a new common definition of terrorism. It defined terrorism as:
“Acts committed with the aim of seriously intimidating a population, forcing a government or international organization to abstain from performing any act, or seriously destabilizing or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organization.”
Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism, defined it as:
“Ineluctably political aims and motives, violent, or equally important, threatening violence, designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target, conducted by an organization with an identifiable chain of command.”
International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and security held in Madrid on March 10, 2005. The panel calls for a definition, which would make it clear:
“Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.”

THE RISE OF TERRORISM:

“Most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and more fundamentalists are not terrorists, but more present day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such.”, writes Bernard Lewis in ‘The Crisis of Islam’.
Thanks to the rapid development of the media, and especially of television, the more recent forms of terrorism are aimed not at specific and limited enemy objectives but at world opinion. Their primary purpose is not to defeat or even to weaken the enemy militarily but not to gain publicity and to inspire fear – a psychological victory. The same kind of terrorism was practiced by a number of European groups, notably in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Ireland. Among the most successful and most enduring in this exercise has been the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The PLO was founded in 1964 but became important in the 1967, after the defeat of the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War. Regular warfare had failed; it was time to try other methods. The targets in this form of armed struggle were not military or other government establishments, which are usually too well guarded, but public places and gatherings of any kind, which are overwhelmingly civilian and in which the victims do not necessarily have a connection to the declared enemy. Examples of this tactic include, in 1970, the hijacking of three aircrafts – one Swiss, one British, and one American – which were all taken to Amman. These and other operations by the PLO were remarkably successful in attaining their immediate objectives – the capture of the newspaper headlines and television screens. They also drew a great deal of support in sometimes-unexpected places, and raised their perpetrators to staring roles in the drama of international relations. Small wonder that others were encouraged to follow their example.
For a while freedom and independence were used as synonymous and interchangeable terms. The early experience of independence, however, revealed that this was a sad error. Independence and freedom are very different, and all too often the attainment of one meant the and of the other, and the replacement of foreign overlords by domestic tyrants, more adept, more intimate, and less constrained in their tyranny.
A new phase in religious mobilization began with the movement known in western languages as pan-Islamism. Launched in the 1860s and 1870s, it probably owed something to the examples of the Germans and the Italians in their successful struggles for national unification in those years. Their Muslim contemporaries and imitators inevitably identified their objectives in religious and communal rather than nationalist or patriotic terms, which at that time were still alien and unfamiliar. But with the spread of European influence and education, these ideas took root and for a while dominated both discourse and struggle in the Muslim lands. Yet the religious identity and loyalty were still deeply felt, and they found expression in several religious movements, notably the Muslim Brothers. With the resounding failure of secular ideologies, they acquired a new importance, and these movements took over the fight – and many of the fighters – from the failed nationalists.
A letter to America published in November 2002, and attributed to Usama Bin Ladin, enumerates in some detail various offences committed not just by the government but also by the people of the US and set forth, under seven headings, “what we are calling you to do, and what we want from you.” The first is to embrace Islam; the second is to stop your oppressions, lies, immorality, and debauchery; the third, to discover and admit that America is a nation without principles or manners; the fourth, to stop supporting Israel in Palestine, the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens, and the Manila government against the Muslims in the southern Philippines; the fifth, to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. This is offered as advice for America’s own goods, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins. The sixth, to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington; seventh, to deal and interact with the Muslims on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of subjugation, theft and occupation. The document ends by telling the Americans that, if they reject this advice, they will be defeated like all the previous Crusaders, and their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.
“If freedom fails and terror triumphs, the peoples of Islam will be the first and greatest victims. They will not be alone, and many others will suffer with them.”

THE TROUBLE WITH TERRORISM:

Charles Townshend writes in “Terrorism”:
“Terrorism upsets people. It does so deliberately. That is its point, and that is why it has engrossed so mush of our attention in the early years of the 21st century. Insecurity can take many forms, but nothing else pays quite so sharply on our sense of vulnerability. After September 11 we found ourselves in an apparently open-ended and permanent state of emergency, a “war against terrorism”, whose ramifications are as inscrutable as terrorism itself. Terrorism is never easy to understand, and least of all in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. When society feels under threat, attempts at rational analysis are often openly resisted as giving aid and comfort to, or even sympathizing with, the enemy. Yet without such analysis, combating Terrorism seems a baffling contest against an indefinite threat. Although Terrorism can sometimes took rational, more often it seems to go straight off the chart of common sense – to be not only unjustifiable, but atrocious, mad or mindless.”

The Problem of Definition:

“Both political and academic efforts to get to grips with terrorism have repeatedly been hung up on the issue of definition, of distinguishing terrorism from criminal violence or military action. In a word it is labeling because terrorist is a description that has almost never been voluntarily adopted by any individual group. It is applied to them by others, first and foremost by the governments of the states they attack. States have not been slow to brand violent opponents with this title, with its clear implications of inhumanity, criminality, and – perhaps most crucially – lack of real political support. Equally, states find it quite easy to produce definitions of Terrorism. The USA, for instance, defines it as ‘ the calculated use or threat of violence to inculcate fear, intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies’; the UK as ‘the use or threat, for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological course of action, of serious violence against any person or property’.”
“In the states view, only the state has the right to use force – it has, as academics tend to say, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. But outsiders may wonder whether all use of violence by non-state actors is equally unjustifiable, even it is formally illegal. The very first revolutionary terrorists in the modern sense believed themselves justified in opposing with violence a repressive regime in which no freedom of political expression or organization was permitted.”
“Thus arose a notorious adage that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. This relativism is central to the impossibly of finding an uncontentious definition of Terrorism.”
“Terrorism is a distinctive form of modern political agency, intended to threaten the ability of a state to ensure the security of its members’ – and thus its claim to legitimacy. To get closer to a definition of Terrorism we need to unpick its political logic. For the core of nearly all definitions of Terrorism – the use of violence for the political ends – is too similar to the definition of war to be much of use.”

Terrorism & War:

“Clearly war and terrorism are intimately related. It is hard to imagine a war that did not generate extreme fear amongst many people, and sometimes this is more than a by-product of violence – it is a primary objective.”
“The essence of Terrorism, by contrast, is surely the negation of combat. Its targets are attacked in a way that inhibits self-defence. But, of course, what marks Terrorism out in the public mind is its readiness to attack not just selected but also random targets; in the indiscriminate bombings of a street market, a store, or a bar, we see a deliberate flouting of the international law of war, and a refusal to accept as binding the prevailing moral distinctions – b/w belligerents and illegitimate targets. So the vital part of the US definition is the non-combatant targets against whom violence is perpetrated.”