There is no such thing as “international terrorism”.
To declare war on “international terrorism” is nonsense. Politicians
who do so are either fools or cynics, and probably both.
Terrorism is a weapon. Like cannon. We would laugh at somebody who declares
war on “international artillery”. A cannon belongs to an army, and
serves the aims of that army. The cannon of one side fire against the cannon
of the other.
Terrorism is a method of operation. It is often used by oppressed peoples,
including the French Resistance to the Nazis in WW II. We would laugh at anyone
who declared war on “international resistance”.
Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military thinker, famously said that “war
is the continuation of politics by other means”. If he had lived with us
today, he might have said: “Terrorism is a continuation of policy by other
means.”
Terrorism means, literally, to frighten the victims into surrendering to the
will of the terrorist.
Terrorism is a weapon. Generally it is the weapon of the weak. Of those who
have no atom bombs, like the ones which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
which terrorized the Japanese into surrender. Or the aircraft which destroyed
Dresden in the (vain) attempt to frighten the Germans into giving up.
Since most of the groups and countries using terrorism have different aims,
often contradicting each other, there is nothing “international” about
it. Each terrorist campaign has a character of its own. Not to mention the fact
that nobody considers himself (or herself) a terrorist, but rather a fighter
for God, Freedom or Whatever.
(I cannot restrain myself from boasting that long ago I invented the formula:
“One man’s terrorist is the other man’s freedom fighter”.)
Many ordinary Israelis felt deep satisfaction after the Paris events. “Now
those bloody Europeans feel for once what we feel all the time!”
Binyamin Netanyahu, a diminutive thinker but a brilliant salesman, has hit
on the idea of inventing a direct link between jihadist terrorism in Europe
and Palestinian terrorism in Israel and the occupied territories.
It is a stroke of genius: if they are one and the same, knife-wielding Palestinian
teenagers and Belgian devotees of ISIS, then there is no Israeli-Palestinian
problem, no occupation, no settlements. Just Muslim fanaticism. (Ignoring, by
the way, the many Christian Arabs in the secular Palestinian “terrorist”
organizations.)