This is what they teach in school these days?

I've been accused of warmongering on behalf of the racist, devil-spawned, Dick Cheney-indoctrinated establishment (in Canada?) for some of my most recent posts.

Fine. At least I do so in a forum where people can choose not to listen to what I have to say.

This afternoon I was having technical difficulties while teaching a Business class to my international students. In search of a working CD player, I wandered into a fellow teacher's classroom and found myself in the middle of an unlikely lecture.

"Jonathon!" the teacher called over to me cheerfully as I snagged his stereo from the desk. "We were just having a discussion here. How would you define terrorism?"

"Um, I don't know...", I stumbled, trying to think of something concise so that I could get back to my own class. "Killing civilians?"

"No, that's wrong!" he contradicted. "Don't you think it's violence undertaken in the pursuit of a political goal? For example, like the American bombing of a city?"

I struggled with the incongruity of the situation. Fifteen English-as-aSecond Language students were being given a lecture on terrorism that I doubted even one of them would be able to understand, much less respond to. Why weren't they learning some phrases they could use in a restaurant?

Here was a teacher in a Vancouver school, on the anniversary of 9/11, lecturing to his students that Al Queda's attack on the World Trade Centre was equivalent to any violence that the army of a sovereign democratic country might undertake to protect its citizens. Real classy.

Despite what Noam Chomsky, US army field manuals or ESL teachers who think they're university lecturers may say about the matter, ordinary people know what terrorism is. By broadening the definition of terrorism to include all violent acts carried out in the pursuit of a political goal, the word terrorism loses its meaning.

Thankfully, the mostly Japanese audience of my colleague's lecture already know this. They will all remember the 1995 Tokyo subway attacks, in which the Aum Shinrikyo sect killed 12 people and injured nearly 6,000 by releasing sarin nerve gas.

They don't have to be told what terrorism is. Hopefully, they also know when to shut their ears, nod politely and think about phrases that they might be able to use at an office party.

Tags: terror apologist, Noam Chomsky, Tokyo subway attack, moral equivalence