Social Justice Art

What do you guys think of this blog post from The Economist?

The GTI uses four indicators to measure the impact of terrorism: the number of terrorist incidents, the number of deaths, the number of casualties and the level of property damage. These indicators are used to create a weighted five year average for each country, which takes into account the lasting effects of terrorism.

The score given to each country therefore indicates the impact of a terrorist attack on a society in terms of the fear and subsequent security response.“

They define terrorism as a violent act by a non-state actor. They’re not counting violence by state actors. Am I the only one that sees this is as problematic? So an effective violent dictatorship is terrorist-free territory, yeah? Look at how squeaky-clean North Korea is on this map.

I think that this problematic definition of terrorism is partly responsible for the unjust deportation order on Jose Figueroa today. Jose was a student organizer for the FMLN, which was back then, a non-state actor that resisted a repressive dictatorship that used death squads on the populace. But I don’t think that student organizers are terrorists, nor is it wrong to stand up against a violent dictatorship.

(I say partly responsible, because the rest of the responsibility lies on the hands of immigration policymakers and that ignorant Canadian Border Services Agency officer who couldn’t bother to look up "FMLN” on Wikipedia.)