You do have a point, and I'm really not trying to gloss over it, but this is something that I'm entirely consistent about: once you start doing stuff which causes harm, in many cases irreversible and often final, to other people in the guise of whatever cause, I hope to see you and your cause get smashed.

But I think this would end up with both opposing causes getting smashed in most of the world's terrorist theatres. Most terrorism starts as a response to irreversible and often final humanitarian harm: it seems to be a good rule of thumb, a bit like Boyle's Law, that oppressing people turns them into terrorists, and --at least for creating largish terrorist groups -- no other force seems strong enough to do so.

I'm discounting lone terrorists such as the Unabomber here. Such people often think they're being oppressed, but the reason they think that is because they're mentally ill.

If I start caring, they win. As long as I see them for what they are, they've lost.

The only way, short of genocide, to end any genuine terrorist conflict is for both sides to stop thinking in terms of "terrorists winning" or "terrorists losing". As long as there are any terrorists, both sides are losing badly. Although, as Northern Ireland shows, the tissue of delicately-worded compromises needed to achieve a situation where, for once, there is peace and both sides win, can be elusive and fragile.

Indeed, is it possible at all? Looking at the centuries-old Northern Ireland conflict, or the century-old (at least) Palestine conflict, it's easy to believe that resolution is unachievable. But other equally volatile situations have been defused. There are no terrorists in England still fighting the Wars of the Roses, or the Catholic/Protestant conflicts of the 1600s. Healing can come. But it takes the removal of oppression, it takes gifted peacemakers, and, most importantly, it takes generations.

Peter