Keep ‘terrorist’ label for actual terrorists

HOW would the victims of terrorism in Christchurch, Sri Lanka or Bali feel about the peaceful actions of coal and vegan protesters being called ‘terrorism’?

There is no comparison between a person who documents cruel living or slaughter conditions of farmed animals, or a person blocking a road to stop work on a coal mine, with a person or people who bomb and blast away other humans to further their cause.

The former is ‘civil disobedience’ and the latter is ‘terrorism’.

The Commonwealth Criminal Code sees the difference too, and specifically states that terrorism is action intended (and this is important) to cause serious physical harm or death to people or causes serious damage to property.

How does showing pics of pigs suffocating slowly or crammed in tiny pens cause serious damage to property? Methinks it may cause damage to profits, but causing damage to profits by imploring ethics is not terrorism and is no way comparable with the atrocities we saw our countryman commit in Christchurch.

Some people might remember when businesses were permitted to refuse to serve Aboriginal people – that was the law, and business owners were going about their lawful businesses refusing service. Activists changed this by sitting in on these businesses and disobeying these obscene laws. Women had to literally fight for the rights we now all take for granted – such as not being sacked once married.

Activists had to disobey unjust laws for these changes to happen.

The suffragettes chained themselves to cars and trucks and were labelled ‘terrorists’ by the same ilk of reactionary establishment as are conflating peaceful activism and civil disobedience with the crimes against humanity properly labelled ‘terrorism’. REBECCA SMITH, Kirwan.