It did not take long after 9/11 for the American government and public to realize that a critical obstacle to combating terrorism effectively was the surprising willingness of people in many parts of the world to excuse or, worse yet, applaud terrorist acts, depending on the cause in whose name they were committed. Notwithstanding the enormity of the attacks on New York and Washington and the wave of sympathy for the United States expressed in most quarters in the immediate aftermath, simply reaching international agreement on the meaning of terrorism proved impossible once someone intoned the mantra that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
“In the Same Light as Slavery”: Building a Global Antiterrorist Consensus
