By James M. Dorsey
Former CIA director and US defense secretary Leon Panetta hit a raw geopolitical nerve by recently labelling Israel’s alleged boobytrapping of Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah’s communication devices as a “form of terrorism.”
Mr. Panetta’s labelling potentially opened a can of worms.
By implication, it upended the West’s accepted criteria for designating terrorists, in addition to singling out Israel and putting it on par with Hamas and Hezbollah, the two groups labelled as terrorists by the United States that Israel is waging war against.
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