As Kurt stated - semantics / the words we use to define & describe what is happening - are of great importantance for a couple of reasons (& others that I'm sure different MMers can expound on.
1) The words we use colour how others perceive & understand a situtation. This obviously affects our reactions & responses to events. Remember a number of comments on this board as to how the press works?
2)History (that thing we are damned & doomed to repeat if we don't learn fron it) can only becompiled based on records - and our records are heavily weighted in words.
So, yeah - semantics are important - they define the difference between a terrorist, a guerilla, and the freedom fighter.

Exactly what I think Puna, but better explained (I'm too vehement sometimes...).

I only want to make a comment: We still have to see one of the 20 or so spaniards who visit this board to disagree with me in this topic. Not because I'm in possession of the absolute truth, but because 90% of the spaniards have very clear what ETA is. And let me tell something more: It is not well understood when someone says they are a "basque separatist group". Think as if a forgeiner called Al-Qaeda members an "arab anti-american group". Is the same non-sense, and the feelings of the spaniards are much like yours could be regarding such an statement.

Fernando

Oooooooooh, feel as if I'm being got at Yes, Eta is a terrorist group, but it is also a Basque separatist group who uses terror as a means to get its message across - therefore both points of view have some degree of validity. All I wanted to say was arguing among ourselves (and very vehemently too) about what to call these people takes away from the condemnation. We can argue about names until the cows come home, but the killings and the bombings and the fear will still continue, and that is what we really want to stop.

I'm not Spanish, so I apologise to Fernando and the others because obviously I can never understand how deeply you feel about the issue. But I have lived in a country that is having to deal with a group that uses/used terror tactics to get its way. The *legitimate targets* of one group were *innocent victims* to the other and vice versa. To me, regardless of labels, people were getting killed - and that can never be right.

The thing is, there's no vice versa in this nightmarish situation. ETA kills, kidnapps, or extorts¿?) whoever they want OR can, whereas us, the rest, all potential victims by the way; in return, can only hope for the police to catch them (someday, as soon as possible) and then the justice system to take them to court.

Lizzie, no apologies needed

A collective is always named after the most relevant characteristic it has. The same way you won't call a group of centroafricans as a group of blacks, because the most relevant characteristic in a context is that they live in central Africa, or that you won't call a group of esquimals just finnish natives.

The semantics do mean, because calling these bastards "a basque separatist group" is calling them not by the most relevant characteristic, but by a characteristic that they share with other collectives that surely don't have anything to do with them. Does Al-Qaeda members be muslim? Yes, does it characterized them as a collective? No. What characterize them is that they are terrorists. Same aplies here.

I don't mind who the victims are: Colombian civilians, paslestinians, israelis, spaniards, americans or whoever suffers from this kind of modern barbarism. When a group of criminals have the ultimate goal of terrifying common people by the use of violence and force, this group is called a terrorist band. Point.

And Pim is right: There are two sides, the ones who kill, and the rest of us who die.

I have friends with members of their families dead. Some days ago (before the Bernabeu bomb) it was near my home where was the bomb. I can only think what if the bomb catched a member of my family, a friend, or someone that I just known, only because he passed through the street where the bomb was placed. Uhhh, Basque separatism? Terrorism!

Fernando

Just booked another trip to Madrid late Sept.Hope to go to the Bernabeu again.Think thats the best response we can give to cowards who hide behind bombs.