A bomb goes off in a busy Middle Eastern restaurant, shredding limbs, eviscerating bodies, delivering a fiery measure of injury and death. Innocents pay the price, with life or limb, suffering from what is clearly an act of terrorism--the deliberately inflicting of harm through violence in the pursuit of a political goal.

The perpetrator was a nineteen year old member of a religion with a fundamentalist credo, convinced up until the moment of the explosion that the suicidal act was the ultimate expression of piety.

Or, alternatively, the perpetrator was the pilot of a jet fighter launching a bomb to strike members of a suspected terrorist organization who were supposedly present in the market. The military later issued a statement that the death of the 12 civilians killed in the market was unfortunate and the military continues to do everything possible to avoid harming innocent civilians.

Except, of course, curtailing bombing runs on populated areas.

Clearly, pundits, politicians, and policy makers invest considerable energy in framing these kinds of acts of violence: one is evil, the other is noble.

To look at matters this way requires a certain amount of Orwellian logic, as Norman Solomon wrote in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting :

When terrorists attack, they're terrorizing. When we attack, we're retaliating.

When they respond to our retaliation with further attacks, they're terrorizing again. When we respond with further attacks, we're retaliating again.

When people decry civilian deaths caused by the U.S. government, they're aiding propaganda efforts. In sharp contrast, when civilian deaths are caused by bombers who hate America, the perpetrators are evil and those deaths are tragedies.

When they put bombs in cars and kill people, they're uncivilized killers. When we put bombs on missiles and kill people, we're upholding civilized values.

When they kill, they're terrorists. When we kill, we're striking against terror.

Solomon was commenting on U.S. missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan back in 1998, but this logical schism, so deeply embedded in our culture, applies to all manner of conflicts.

Shortly after the fateful events of September 11, 2001, Noam Chomsky gave a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discussing The New War Against Terror . During this talk, he said:

That is the culture in which we live and it reveals several facts. One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn’t fail. It works. Violence usually works. That’s world history. Secondly, it’s a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it’s primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror. Now that’s close to universal. I can’t think of a historical exception, even the worst mass murderers view the world that way.

He concluded this train of thought with the statement:

Terrorism is not the weapon of the weak. It is the weapon of those who are against ‘us’ whoever ‘us’ happens to be. And if you can find a historical exception to that, I’d be interested in seeing it.

Terrorism that originates from the state, institutional terrorism, has become so engrained in our culture that highly questionable acts are rarely questioned. Can the widespread use of cluster munitions that spread death and destruction years after their initial use be justified as anything other than faceless violence targeting innocents. According to the United Nations Development Fund and UN Children's Fund , at least 55 million cluster bomb sub-munitions were dropped on Iraq over the span of two wars. Unexploded ordinance exacts a particularly gruesome toll on children, who often pick up bombs thinking they are playthings. The UN stated that of the 565 victims of cluster bombs in 2006, one quarter were under the age of 18. Lebanon also bears witness to the destructiveness of cluster munitions; Israel dropped an estimated 2.6 to 4 million submunitions (most of which were manufactured in the United States) across the country through June through August of 2006. Dozens have been killed and hundreds wounded, often losing limbs, since the end of the conflict. Human Rights Watch also noted during the conflict that Hezbollah fired more than a hundred rockets into Israel packed with cluster submunitions.

In What We Leave Behind, Frida Berrigan, writing for In These Times, described one incident from Lebanon that typifies the brutal nature of these weapons.

An Israeli Defense Forces spokesman insists that “all of the weapons and munitions used by the IDF are legal according to international law and their use conforms to international standards.” That is cold comfort for the family of 11-year-old Ramy Shibleh, one of the post-war victims. He was gathering pinecones outside Halta, a small southern town where the Lebanese army had already cleared mines twice. But more bombs remained, including the one that Ramy and his brother hit with their cart of pinecones. Reuters reports that Ramy tried to toss the rock-like object out of the way, but it exploded, tearing off his right arm and the back of his head and killing him instantly. His mother keeps the shreds of the yellow shirt Ramy was wearing when he died. “He was only picking the pine nuts to buy the toys he loved,” she told reporters.

Another curious wrinkle in the accepted paradigms of our age is state-sanctioned assasination by missle strike, a helicopter attack, or even a missile-equipped drone aircraft. The euphemism "taking out" is typically used for these acts and, as might be expected, there is a high percentage of civilian casualties, usually brushed off as incidental to the necessity of neutralizing the insurgents.

As Adil E. Shamoo and Bonnie Bricker wrote for AlterNet in Immoral: Ignoring the Routine Killings of Civilians in Terror Wars,

A suspected terrorist link - especially when officials try to establish an Al-Qaeda affiliation -- seems to be a sufficient justification for any military action, however immoral it might otherwise be.

The most disturbing aspect of this news is that most American journalists, political analysts, and politicians do not dare to question the morality of dropping bombs or missiles on the hideouts of suspected - but not demonstrated - terrorists. It has become routine; it is the norm in Iraq. The U.S. arsenal of so-called "precision weapons" creates an impression that the bombs kill only terrorists, but the number of civilian deaths in these "precise" actions usually exceeds by many multiples the number of actual terrorists killed. And, on not a few occasions, the whole thing has turned out to be a disastrous mistake. American apologies for those civilian deaths begin to sound hollow when these actions are repeated again and again.

No matter the colors in the banner being waved over the proceedings, there is no genuine moral distinction between inflicting death and injury on innocents in the name of a political cause. Whether you spring from a rebel camp or the army of a major national state, it is the same essential act. Terrorism is morally repugnant regardless of the source. The presumption that if this terrorism originates from the state, sanctified under the rubric of institutional terrorism, it is somehow exalted. Until this presumption is erased from our worldview, violence will continue unabated. Mahatma Gandhi said it this way:

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?