A Quote by Noam Chomsky

Terror became a big issue when the Reagan Administration came in. They immediately announced [their plans] and kind of disparaged Carter's alleged human rights programs. The main issue is state-directed international terrorism. Right at that time that big industry developed. That's when you start getting the academic departments on terrorism.
We have struggled with terrorism for a long time. In the Reagan administration, I was a hawk on the subject. I said terrorism is a big problem, a different problem, and we have to take forceful action against it. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan agreed with me, but not many others did.
Abortion is a states' rights issue. Education is a states' right issue. Medicinal marijuana is a states' rights issue. Gay marraige is a states' rights issue. Assisted suicide- like Terri Schiavo- is a states' rights issue. Come to think of it, almost every issue is a states' rights issue. Let's get the federal government out of our lives.
Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.
There was a time that human rights was not even an issue in this country. Then prisoners' rights became an issue.
There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong - deadly wrong - to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.
The wheel of government will continue to work, even as these people come in and we wait for them, but the issue is, there's always one thing, that a new administration confronts.For the Bush administration, it was terrorism. For this administration, it's going to be cyber-security, not Russian hacking. That's a symptom of the bigger problem, but the bigger issue of cyber, how they deal with that. So, we may see something else we're not anticipating. That's going to be their challenge.
This issue of terrorism is as much an issue for Pakistan as it is a Western issue.
It would be easy to define terrorism as attacks against human rights and international humanitarian law forbids attacks against innocent non-combatants which is often the definition used for terrorism.
In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality... it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time.
Lots of countries, like Israel, live with terrorism every day, and it doesn't impact their integrity. The big threat to America is the way we react to terrorism by throwing away what everybody values about our country - a commitment to human rights. America is a great nation because we are a good nation.
The fight against terrorism is a legitimate fight. And certainly whoever commits terrorism should be brought to justice. Unfortunately, the United States and a few other governments have used the war on terrorism as a way of violating human rights.
We support every effort to combat international terrorism through the formulation of international conventions and hope that the international community will take further steps to improve the anti-terrorism international legal framework.
In fact if you look at Reagan's global war on terrorism it very quickly turned into a massive terrorist war: [by us] Central America, South Africa, the Middle East, all U.S.-backed terrorism. That's one of the reasons why it disappeared from history and why the standard line is that Bush 43 declared the war on terror. Actually he just repeated what Reagan had said 20 years earlier.
Slavery was, in a very real sense, the first international human rights issue to come to the fore. It led to the adoption of the first human rights laws and to the creation of the first human rights non-governmenta l organization. And yet despite the efforts of the international community to combat this abhorrent practice, it is still widely prevalent in all its insidious forms, old and new.
It would not be desirable to include 'terrorism' among international crimes subject to International Criminal Court jurisdiction if defined to apply only to anti-state acts of violence. The failure to include terrorism as a distinct crime was due to the inability to agree upon its proper definition.
We saw what happened in Jimmy Carter's administration. President Carter was a good man with the best of intentions. But he came to Washington without a good working relationship with Democratic members of Congress, which played a big part in his administration's problems.
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