Interesting Editorial on Terror in Arab News

An editorial on the Arab News website laments that the Euromed Summit in Barcelona did not produce a resolution on terror and makes the following observations:

By seeking to push through a politically loaded deal, the joint hosts, Spain and Britain, missed the opportunity to agree on the far more important statement that what makes modern terrorists such reprehensible criminals is that they target innocent civilians. The problem is that European governments in particular seem incapable of talking about the inhumanity of the latest terrorist depravity, without then relating the crime to their own political agenda.

This is nothing new. What is lost in this debate is the fact that whatever insurgents call themselves or are called, the majority of their victims are civilians. The calculation is as simple as it is sordid. If the populace can be terrified by bombs and murder, civil society will break down, the authorities will collapse and the insurgents will triumph. Therefore the more innocent blood that is shed and the more grotesque the butchery, the greater the impact for the terrorists’ cause.

That sounds pretty reasonable. Then the editorial begins to go off-track:

The real definition of terror is the indiscriminate taking of the lives of people whose only guilt is to be living in the society that is under attack. And it is not just Al-Qaeda and its murderous offshoots that have committed terror crimes. In the closing days of World War II, when Germany was all but beaten, British and American bombers obliterated the city of Dresden, slaying maybe 100 , 000 civilians. That was an act of terrorism. The Germans were already broken and just seven weeks away from collapse.

And if killing civilians to terrify them into submission is accepted as the definition of terrorism, then some of those most passionate warriors against it may have reasons to scale down their rhetoric. That definition fits Al-Qaeda attacks. It also fits “shock and awe” that the Pentagon spelled out as the strategy of the Iraq offensive.

Dresden is an interesting case. I don't think that ultimately it counts as terrorism, but it would take some space to explain why. The writer is totally wrong on "shock and awe," which was not meant to terrorize a civilian population but to convince a hostile government and army of overwhelming US military might. So the question would be this: does the moral equivalence gesture cancel out any positive impact the editorial might have as a condemnation of terror in the Arab press? Further thoughts: The problem is that the distorted depiction of American military actions substitutes here for the usual gesture in the direction of "resisting occupation." So it's the same old denial in a new guise.