CALGARY -- This week's arrest of six Canadians of Tamil origin on terrorism
charges reminds me of Sir Peter Ustinov's brilliant maxim: "Terrorism is the
war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

In an apparent rush to U.S. President George Bush's ideology and policies, the
Harper government recently added Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers guerillas to its
terrorism list. The U.S. added the group last year.

In 1983, civil war erupted in Sri Lanka after decades of growing strife
between majority Sinhalese Buddhists and minority Hindu Tamils. Tamil Tigers
guerillas have waged a ferocious, bloody struggle against the Sinhalese
government for an independent Tamil state. Over 65,000 Sri Lankans have died.
The war continues in spite of foreign mediation.

Sri Lanka's Sinhalese control the army, navy and air force. The Tigers have
only small arms, in large part purchased with money raised by Canada's 250,000
Tamils.

Canada's Irish did the same for the IRA. Canadian Jews raised funds to buy
arms for Israel's independence struggle from Britain. Sikh separatists in
Punjab were funded by Canadian Sikhs.

The Tigers are courageous, highly effective fighters -- call them the
Hezbollah of South Asia. They used their bodies as human bombs to fight first
the government army, then India when it invaded Sri Lanka in the 1980s in an
effort to annex the island. A female Tiger blew up Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi in
1991.

The Tigers are exceedingly brutal and often murderous. They are a fanatical,
highly dangerous totalitarian organization. But they are not "terrorists," as
the U.S. and now Canada claim.

Terrorism is generally defined as "attacks on civilians for political
purposes." Mad dogs who blow up airliners, trains and schools are terrorists,
no question. But under this definition, then what do we call the Allied mass
slaughter of civilians in Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagasaki and
Hiroshima?

Or Russia's massacre of 100,000 Muslim Chechens a decade ago; Israel's 1982
bombardment of Beirut that killed 18,000 civilians; U.S. destruction in 1991
of Iraq's water treatment plants, creating an epidemic that killed hundreds of
thousands of children?

What about the indiscriminate bombing of Afghan villages by U.S., Canadian and
NATO forces? Or the recent killing of over 1,000 Lebanese and Israeli
civilians, denounced by Amnesty International as a war crime?

Those accusing others of terrorism are often far more guilty of it themselves.
Tamil Tigers ably govern a third of Sri Lanka. Dismissing them as "terrorists"
is as meaningless and misleading as calling Hezbollah, which is Lebanon's only
effective, non-corrupt government, "terrorist thugs."

Enough with propaganda labels. I detest this deceitful, poisonous
term, "terrorism," which has become a propaganda weapon to demonize political
opponents.

Canada has recently made itself an enemy of the Muslim world and now faces
attacks on its citizens and business interests abroad. This is not a good time
to kick the Tamil Tigers hornet's nest. Sometimes it's better to avert your
gaze, as previous Canadian governments did, and not seek trouble --
particularly when the Tigers have committed no hostile acts against Canada or
the U.S.

Terrorism is a tactic, not a thing. Tamil Tigers are fighting for independence
after decades of oppression. We westerners have forgotten that armed
resistance to intolerable oppression is a legitimate right of all peoples.
One really must ask why Ottawa is sticking its nose into another remote,
bloody foreign war and creating new security problems for Canadians when it
can't provide even Second World health care to its own people.

Source: Toronto Sun By: ERIC MARGOLIS
Date: 27 August 2006