Even With Translators, U.S. And Russia Can’t Agree On Definition Of Terrorism Read More Here: Http:

[Purveyor]

WASHINGTON

While they confer about “de-conflicting” their bombing raids in Syria, U.S. and Russian military officials also might want to discuss what the word “terrorist” means.

That would be an easier discussion for the Russians, who began conducting airstrikes Wednesday, than the Americans, who’ve been bombing Syria for more than a year.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals, the definition of “terrorist,” when it comes to the increasingly turbulent Syrian civil war, is simple: anyone who uses violence to try to topple President Bashar Assad.

Assad is a dictator, but he’s Moscow’s dictator. Just as the late Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was Washington’s dictator, for decades, before President George W. Bush turned against him and launched an ill-fated March 2003 invasion whose consequences are still playing out more than a dozen years later across the Middle East, from Syria and Iraq to Libya and Iran.

--CLIP
But the United States’ uneasy alliances with Turkey and the elusive “moderate opposition groups” in Syria, along with the reluctance of Obama and Congress to get drawn further into that nation’s bloody disaster, require American leaders to engage in verbal jujitsu when asked if the U.S.-led air campaign is also targeting the Nusra Front, Ahrar al Shram and other al Qaida-linked groups.

“The fundamental problem is that the United States is trying to divorce its international anti-terrorism campaign from the rest of the Syrian civil war,” Christopher Kozak, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, told McClatchy. “That’s very difficult as we saw when the (U.S.-trained) New Syrian Force went in and just got obliterated by Nusra. The rebels want to fight the regime, not ISIS.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article37411218.html#storylink=cpy

[Hydra]

1. *Laughs*

Nobody can agree among the terrorist superpowers who is not a terrorist(target of opportunity). Color me surprised.

[bemildred]

2. "When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose

it to mean — neither more nor less."

Newspeak all the way.

[Nitram]

3. Has nothing to do with semantics...

...and everything to do with politics. Our freedom fighters are their terrorists and visa versa.

[Igel]

4. You try to disambiguate between the two.

Such words carry significant political baggage. That's part of their meaning and helps determine their usage--which is to say, their semantics.

A word can have a core meaning but ultimately, in some theories, you must also know the word's usus. It's not a common word, to be sure, nor a common concept, but it's "out there" and more accepted in Russian linguistics than in English. Knowing a word's meaning doesn't help in knowing where it's used, and often where it's used helps determine how best to translate it. "Terrorizm", like the former mess with translating "fashizm," requires knowing how it's used. Both are used radically differently from in English, but with overlap in form, meaning, and usus that creates real headaches for translation.

Usus.