In May 2013, the renowned International Institute for Counter Terrorism, the ICT, held a global workshop of legal scholars, experts, analysts, in order to work toward an international definition of terrorism. Without exception, all panelists worked against the effort led by Dr. Boaz Ganor. In his closing remarks, he lamented the frustrating and sterile experience. “We will never reach the level of counter terrorism efficiency and cooperation that is needed (…) without agreeing on the basic issue. What are we fighting? What is the common denominator? (…) The first issue is that it is a subjective term, and you can not use subjective tools to a subjective term.”
Dr. Ganor later outlines the fundamental issue: that any global cooperation in counter-terrorism is based around sanctions, blacklisting, arrests, detention, prosecution, extradition, and use of force around a concept no one has grasped, but perhaps most dangerously, has refused to grasp. Any international or transnational response to counter-terrorism is based on a loose definition, that is the lowest common denominator of all current legal translations of terrorism in domestic criminal systems. It is therefore unreliable and extensive to the point of creating crimes of terrorism where there are none, because of the Venn diagrams it forces upon an international or transnational arrest warrant, extradition treaty, or intelligence cooperation. Terrorism has become meaningless as a term, say political analysts, because if everything is terrorism, nothing is terrorism. It is a complete fallacy. It is not that everything is terrorism. It’s that everything is made to beterrorism.