Why is everyone so biased in considering that terrorism is only related to death being caused by a group to another group? Not that such circumstances should not be considered. But I have been waiting for someone to state the obvious, which didn't happen yet.
If you adopt the view that terrorism targets innocent civilians, then everytime some moron commits credit card fraud, he has committed an act of terrorism. Under the same view, the Enron and Worldcom scandals can easily be viewed as acts of terorism, and it is a fact that a huge number of civilians have suffered and will continue to suffer as a consequence of the acts of imbeciles like Ebbers. Does it matter that they haven't been killed literally? And this would only be the tip of the iceberg.
One reason why such a definition is not given and adopted yet could very well be the liability under the law, so to speak. You cannot give a strictly oriented definition of terrorism (to serve only one purpose, say that of armed conflicts) since the concepts involved in the definition could easily be extended to other social, political and economical aspects of life. Which would be inconvenient for many, to say the least.
