Crime is easy to describe as any behavior that is generally unacceptable and causes injury to an individual or a group of individuals. Theft, robbery, burglary, corruption, embezzlement, physical and mental violence, rape and killing are easier to categorize as crimes. But when it comes to terrorism, it becomes hard to have a world wide acceptable definition.
This difficulty to identify an act as a terrorist act has been one of the key reasons why the world is grappling with a three headed monster called in the present day, “terrorism”. Though everyone accepts that terrorism is a kind of crime, a heinous one at that, the very fact that a terrorist for one is a martyr for others has made the situation very puzzling. It is simple to tell between a crime and an act of terrorism on reason of guilt/innocence proceedings and sentencing procedures. An ordinary criminal, when he pleads guilty, is awarded a sentence in keeping with his crime and serves the sentence in prison. But terrorism works on the basis of an ideology, it is a belief that motivates someone or a group of individuals to engage in acts of violence as they believe that this is the only way to make their grievances heard or felt. Some links or similarities between ordinary crimes and the issue of terrorism are:
1. Both operate secretly and usually from an underground network
2. Both use ‘muscle and ruthlessness’ on primarily civilian victims
3. Intimidation is characteristic of both groups
4. Both use similar (though not entirely overlapping) tactics: kidnappings, assassination, extortion (“protection money”, “revolutionary taxes”)
5. In both cases, the control of the group over the individual is strong
6. Both use front organizations, such as legitimate businesses or charities.
While it is complicated to disagree that there are no key differences between terrorist and organized crime groups, many argue that even if the two types of organizations are not the same, there are...