Notice the spectacular hop from “may have killed someone at some point” to “safety of millions”. I wonder how a defunct Greek group of a few dozen people never active in Britain could be a threat to millions in Britain for example.

More people die in road accidents than terrorist attacks, exponentially more, but nobody locks up members of motorists’ rights groups or journalists who oppose speed cameras to “protect millions” - it wouldn’t be fair, proportional or even useful. You’re more likely to be killed by your partner than by a terrorist. Actually more people are killed in Britain by police officers than by terrorists, though the state doesn’t want us to admit it. Terrorism is used as a disproportionate bugbear because of its conceptual looseness, its usefulness to the state and its association with connotatively defined mythological stereotypes drawn largely from popular film and fiction - the exaggerated risk of mass destruction for example. It’s impossible to estimate the risk of an attack killing “millions” but the it must be approaching zero - certainly less than the equally terrifying and doubtless larger risks of a reactor breach at Sellafield, a plane crash by a nuke-bearing American jet near Fairford or an accidental letoff of a stockpiled Russian ICBM - not to mention the truly overwhelming risks posed by global warming.

PMOI was removed because it successfully sued in the courts (first in Europe, then in Britain). The lists are thankfully not faring well in the European court system.

November 17th is not the strongest “yes”. There are several other qualified “yeses”. N17 is a borderline case because the civilian status of the people it targeted is questionable - they were not technically military but were always personally connected to pro-system violence.

Governments are NOT in a good position to assess who is “a threat to our liberties” since they are the biggest threat. Real terrorists threaten lives not liberty. Regular armed opposition groups threaten state armies and officials, not civilians (hence the state is protecting itself, not us). Bogus terrorists don’t threaten anything. The proof is in the list - most of those on it are no threat to anyone in Britain or to civilians anywhere.

A person who raises money by selling drugs is not a terrorist but merely a drug dealer (or a pharmaceutical company).

A person who uses violence is not necessarily a terrorist, they might be a soldier, a street fighter, a gangster, a police officer, a resistance fighter, a shopkeeper who fights off thieves, etc.

A group which kidnaps might be an extortion gang, not necessarily terrorist.

There’s a definition of terrorism at the top. I said a terrorist commits the equivalent of war crimes by killing civilians (”innocent people” is rather a subjective category in contrast - innocent by whose criteria of guilt?). Many of the organisations on the list are or were armed opposition groups which killed soldiers, paramilitary police or military-connected government officials, which is not “equivalent to a war crime”. It is only possible to logically say that a group is terrorist because it kills someone, if one logically takes the position of condemning war in all circumstances. If one accepts the idea of legitimate armed opposition in any circumstance (foreign occupation or tyranny for example), one has to distinguish legitimate armed oppositionists from terrorists. I actually think we should go further and reserve the term terrorist for groups who commit types of armed action which are never justified - we might disapprove of or condemn a group fighting an unjust or unnecessary guerrilla war but that doesn’t make them terrorists.

But if terrorism is defined to include all present or former armed opposition groups which have killed someone, then hundreds of groups - some of them British-backed - would be on the list, along with the current governments of most of the global South. Also, if a group is primarily a guerrilla army which has committed occasional abuses, then it should not simply be called terrorist because only a tiny portion of what it does is terrorist - otherwise it would again be necessary to include hundreds of groups including most state armies. The selectivity says it all - Palestinian groups but not Israeli groups, Marxists but not fascists, enemies of valued allies but not enemies of powerless or unpopular states.

Worse, not all the groups are even armed opposition groups. A few of the groups are not even armed opposition groups and have not killed anyone. Batasuna (treated as part of ETA) is a political party, al-Muhajiroun is a political advocacy group and ISYF is a pro-independence fundraising group. This is straightforward political persecution.

In short, the list is bogus, repressive, politically motivated, selective in discriminatory ways, and a thousand different kinds of wrong.

Such attacks on civil liberties are far more terrifying to me than all the terrorists in the world put together.

I would like to make special comment to

“November 17 (Greece)

Terrorist? Probably fair comment—” I find it appaling that that’s the strongest judgement you come to when you are seemingly aware of their “terrorist-eque” actions-ie killing of innocent people. Regardless of the right behind any of these groups’ causes, nearly all you’ve mentioned have at somepoint expended the lifes of others during their history to try and further a goal that they see appropriate, that they see leads to the best outcome for them. I think a redifing of terrorist organisation is in order.

P.S The PMOI was legalised on the 24/6/08 in the UK.

P.P.S. Could you please explain what it is precisely that governments themselves have to gain by outlawing organisations such as these? Do you seriously believe that “they” do it for themselves and not for the safety of millions? Are they not in a better position to judge what or who is more like to pose a threat to our liberties than we?

Hezbollah has only recently been added to the official list. The reason for this that the government has given is that Hezbollah recieves funding from - and therefore is allied with - Iran and Hezbollah is active in promoting insurgency in Iraq thus operating as a threat to British [occupying] forces.

This is, of course, a lame excuse. But that’s the one they gave. Read it in The Guardian. The real reason is obviously to do with the government’s latent but ill-concealed Zionist leanings.

This criterion should not be relevant. It is deeply immoral for Britain to set itself up as a country where international terrorists can base themselves - so long as they didn’t attack British interests. We did this for a long long time for Islamist extremists.

It is profoundly naive to think that they won’t one day turn around and bite the hand that feeds them - as of course the Islamists did.

We should never make that mistake again. Terrorism is terrorism, regardless of where it takes place. Using Britain as a base to organise terrorist atacks in a foreign country should never, ever, be tolerated again.