@anon, it depends how you look at this... if you look at every military strike as terrorism, then obviously what Israel is doing could be called that. The way I look at it is like many others do, but different from this. In other words... what's going on in Lebanon right now is war, at least in my view. I'm not calling hezbollah terrorists in their current situation, but I am calling them terrorists for sneaking across the border, killing a few guys and grabbing a few for ransom. I'm also calling terrorism some guy/woman strapping some explosives and running into a crowded market or birthday bash. The palestinians... bad choice of words... hamas does the terrorist stuff because they don...

@anon, it depends how you look at this... if you look at every military strike as terrorism, then obviously what Israel is doing could be called that. The way I look at it is like many others do, but different from this. In other words... what's going on in Lebanon right now is war, at least in my view. I'm not calling hezbollah terrorists in their current situation, but I am calling them terrorists for sneaking across the border, killing a few guys and grabbing a few for ransom. I'm also calling terrorism some guy/woman strapping some explosives and running into a crowded market or birthday bash. The palestinians... bad choice of words... hamas does the terrorist stuff because they don't have the means to actually fight a war... and even if they started a war, like the war we're seeing in Lebanon - they know they'd lose. So, the only thing they can do is put together their little vests or pipes with something that explodes, add as many nails, ball bearings etc. in it for maximum damage and send their kid out to do the deed. That's terrorism.

I give some credit to hezbollah to try to fight a war now, although as prepared, armed and intent they are - they're clearly no match in terms of firepower and if Israel didn't play games and actually fought with what they have - hezbollah would be a thing of the past by now... unfortunately they're entrenched right within the Lebanese civilian population and Israel is trying to avoid collateral damage as much as possible... Resuts therefore are crappy, AFAIC - because they aren't accomplishing what they sat out to do as quickly as they could and even though they're trying to spare the population, they still have some, although minimal considering, but some collateral damage and so they get slammed PR-wise.

Anyway, that's my take on it... to me it's pretty clear what's terrorism and what's war.

The litmus test would be rather simple - all of the hamas/hezbollahs etc. stop their terrorist ways and then we would see just how much of a terrorist state Israel is.

That's not going to happen soon for 2 simple reasons:
1) Palestinians know damn well that if they stopped - Israel wouldn't touch them... that's not their intent in this game of chess, so they continue with their approach, aka terrorism\
2) Even though everyone's trying to comment as if the end result everyone wanted was peace... I still contend that it's NOT what the terrorists want. Just listen to the Iranian napoleon - he explains it in very clear and uncertain terms. So, it's silly for the whole world to work under a no...

The litmus test would be rather simple - all of the hamas/hezbollahs etc. stop their terrorist ways and then we would see just how much of a terrorist state Israel is.

That's not going to happen soon for 2 simple reasons:
1) Palestinians know damn well that if they stopped - Israel wouldn't touch them... that's not their intent in this game of chess, so they continue with their approach, aka terrorism\
2) Even though everyone's trying to comment as if the end result everyone wanted was peace... I still contend that it's NOT what the terrorists want. Just listen to the Iranian napoleon - he explains it in very clear and uncertain terms. So, it's silly for the whole world to work under a notion that it's somehow an even-handed environment and both sides want peace - BS. Israel wants peace... the terrorists want peace... the kind that eliminates Israel and everyone in it... and they aren't getting it that way... so the whole thing continues.

People keep putting up statistics, talk about how poor and oppressed the palestinians are etc. etc. etc. Smoke, nothing more. One simply has to listen to ahmadinejad, or whatever his name is, and everything becomes painfully clear as to intent of each party in the mix.

Right now Israel is doing something that should've been done by the world community 20 years ago... There would be no lebanese casualties in the stats if that was done. Now with the war raging due to this omission - statistics get fed. Perhaps the world would learn from it... perhaps not.