Three incidents in my life that today might have been classed as terrorist attacks.

Has terrorism has been redefined?

TERRORIST BUS ATTACK 

Way back in 1979 a bus driver in my home town run over 6 people waiting at a bus stop.
My sister and I were on our way school and were on the opposite side of the road waiting to cross and so we witnessed the whole horror unfold.In fact the bus was the very one we were to take to school that day and if we had been only some minutes earlier we too would have been mowed down. All who were waiting at that bus stop were killed in the most horrific way.
It was a horrible sight, blood and body parts everywhere all over the road. The bus stop shelter itself was also destroyed. The driver did not stop and finally ended up crashing into a house with half the bus in someone´s front living room.
When the police arrived on the scene the driver informed them that he had a knife and would either kill himself or anyone who came near him.
One of the policemen at the scene was local guy, a neighbor of mine in fact, and he calmly talked and listened to the driver for almost two hours and eventually the diver came out of the bus in tears. The policeman calmly put a blanket around the driver and lead him into the back of a police car.
In my quiet little village this was a rare incident it say the least.
It was later reported in the newspaper that the driver of the number H3 bus was a Muslim who had suffered from a nervous break down due to some family trauma.
The local church held a mass for the relatives of those who lost their lives and they also prayed for the bus driver too.
The whole case was reported as "a tragic incident".
My sister and I still went to the same bus stop the very next day and got the H3 bus to school, we did not believe the incident would happen again.
Little did we know back on those days how naive we were for we now know that it should have been classed as terrorist attack.

TERRORIST KILLS TWO MEN IN A BAR/PUB

In 1980, again in my home town, in a local bar called "The Junction", a man stabbed  two people and they both died. One died instantly and the other died later in hospital.
I often visited that bar myself but I was not there on that particular night.
However, when I heard about the attack I went to ask the owner what had happened. As I went in I saw the carpet to the entrance was thick with blood stains. The sight gave me a cold shiver.
The owner told me that two guys got into an argument and it escalated into violence. One pulled out a knife and in the struggle one got stabbed.  A stranger tried to stop the fight and he got stabbed too,
The police were called and arrived very quickly at the scene as did the ambulance.
In my quiet town this was a rare incident and it was the talk of the town for a while. However, people, including myself still carried on going to that bar.
The whole case was reported as "an unfortunate incident".
As I say we were naive back in those days and perhaps it should have been called a terrorist attack and never gone back to that bar in case it happened again.

TERRORIST GROUP TERRORIZE SMALL TOWN

In 982, once again, in my home town, a quiet little town on the edge of the main city, there was reports of a gang of youths who had been attacking people with razor blades. Apparently they were using box cutters and had come up with the brutal idea of having two razor blades in the handle with a match-stick between them. This made a gap between the blades which meant when they cut someone it made cut much wider and thus leave a wider scar on the person the attacked.
Warning were given out by the police informing towns folk to be extra vigilant at night and telling of the description of the gang who were all dressed in green coats with hoods.
One night I went to visit my friends from college and together we listened to the latest record album of "The Human League". We ad great time chatting together and I left my friend´s house at around 10.30pm
My friend lived across town from my house and this meant I had to go through the town center. As I walked the warning of the "razor-blade" gang entered my head and I was looking all around me scanning the area of any gangs or groups of people dressed in green coats.
Anyway, just as I finally got onto the main street that lead out of the town center I heard a voice shouting. I look back and saw a gang of youths, about six in number, and they were all dressed in green coats with hoods. When they saw me look back at them they began to run towards me and now they were all shouting,
As you can imagine a sharp wave of fear came over me and I began to run as fast as I could. I knew the back streets well and was cutting down all the alleyways and eventually hid behind a garbage container. I watched the gang go past and I could hear them talking to themselves wondering where I had got to. As soon as they were out of sight I ran in the opposite direction.
I made it home safe and I did not even tell my parents what had happened. The next day at college I told my friends that I was chased by the notorious "razor-blade" gang and we all laughed about the incident. Two days later I visited my friends house again but this time I did not get chased.
Eventually the gang were arrested and were quickly forgotten and the town settled down to daily life.

Again, as I say we were naive back in those days and perhaps I should have reported the incident to the police and perhaps they would have classed it as "an attempted terrorist attack" and told townsfolk not to go out at night until the terrorist threat was over. 

P

TheLEASE NOTE; In no way am I trying to lessen the recent "terrorist" incidents in Manchester or London for indeed they are terrible and atrocious. My point here is the highlight how the use of the terms "terrorist/terrorism seems to me to have been magnified out of proportion and in some way used as a political method to instill ever more Fear Uncertainty and Doubt into the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens.

I remember the huge IRA bomb attack in 1993 where an entire district was blown to pieces (see below)

The

People in London, as well as the whole of the UK, were shocked and horrified at the incident of course.
Yet the very next day people went to work and helped in the clearing up of the mess. There were no armed police put on the streets of the entire city and no one remotely considered that another attack was "imminent" or warnings for people to be vigilant or change their life style or behavior.
I actually do not remember the police calling it a "terrorist attack" but rather that it was an attack by the group know as the IRA  (the Irish Republican Army) who were fighting for their country to be free from being part of the United Kingdom. Ones person has the view of a terrorist and another has the view of being a "freedom fighter".

So what is terrorism today?

America and Britain have been bombing the Middle East for over decade now with thousands of innocent men. women and children being killed almost daily. One can imagine that the families/friends of these massacred people might have some kind of reaction with some of them perhaps wanting revenge. 

And so so perhaps some of these outraged people attack in the only way they can. They get in a car and run over people, or they get a knife and stab someone to death, or they tie a home-made bomb around their body and explode themselves and others to pieces in order to make a point or to get attention to their cause.

So when we in the west are attacked we call it terrorism but when we drop bombs on a group of people in a small village in Afghanistan or Iraq in order in order to kill one person among them who has been fingered as a terrorist, we all it "the war on terror".

It appears that there is one rule for one side and an another rule for the other.
In my humble opinion we have to, as a society, understand that when we attack another nation, that there will be consequences to our actions. And if we then experience these consequences, such as a lone killer with a knife, a lorry driver mowing down people at a market or suicide bomber, then we must be aware that are not completely innocent in the matter.
In my understanding of what terrorism today is that it has to be linked some kind of fundamental Islamism.
Thus the only difference between the bus driver who run over six people at a bus stop in 1979, and someone who did the same act today, would be their motivation for doing such an event.
So back in 1979 the bus driver crashed into six people because had suffered a nervous breakdown was not classed as a terrorist, but if today a bus driver did exactly the same thing told that he did it as revenge for the atrocities on Iraq then he would be classed as a terrorist.
The man in the bar in 1980 who stabbed and killed two people was arrested and charged with manslaughter and being in possession of a lethal weapon. But it today the exact same event happened in the exact same bar and the man shouted "Allah akbar" as he stabbed the two men, then he would be arrested as a terrorist murderer.

And the razor-blade-wielding gang that "terrorized" the streets of my home town for a couple months during the winter of 1982, were eventually caught and arrested for "acts of criminal violence" and causing "grievous bodily harm" were basically labelled as "thugs".
But if today the exact same group began doing the same things and had an Islamic flag or icon on their green coats, then they too would be classed as "terrorists".
I am not exactly sure what I am trying to say here, but I just know something does not feel right.

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