"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, 'Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. But fool me... can't get fooled again!'."

~ Dubya interpretation of 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me', Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

The anti-Assad propaganda is in full swing with contradictory and unsubstantiated claims that the Syrian government has "used chemical weapons against its own people." Against this backdrop of faulty, evocative rhetoric, Israel recently launched deadly air strikes on Syrian territory. Like textbook plagiarism or a record on repeat, we're seeing a re-run of the 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' (WMD) lies that led to the illegal invasion of Iraq ten years ago.

UN investigator Carla del Ponte reported that if any sarin gas was used in Syria, it was actually fired by the US-backed opposition rebel forces, not the state forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

The damning additional fact is that the Syrian 'rebels' the West are arming are, in reality, terrorist 'Al-Qaeda' factions, as has been admitted in the French daily Le Monde and supported by an admission in the New York Times. Just as many Azawadi rebels in northern Mali last year defected from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad to Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Maghreb and other CIA fronts ahead of full-scale military intervention by Western powers in January 2013, Free Syrian Army 'rebels' are consolidating their allegiances to (and pooling their resources with) Jabhat al-Nusra, "an Al Qaida associate operating in Syria" that is responsible for cross-border attacks in Turkey and Lebanon.

What definition of the term includes this horrific act of violence but excludes the acts of the US, the UK and its allies?

Two men yesterday engaged in a horrific act of violence on the streets of London by using what appeared to be a meat cleaver to hack to death a British soldier. In the wake of claims that the assailants shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the killing, and a video showing one of the assailants citing Islam as well as a desire to avenge and stop continuous UK violence against Muslims, media outlets (including the Guardian) and British politicians instantly characterized the attack as "terrorism".

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term "terrorism", it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be "terrorism", many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That's the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the "terrorists": sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don't deliberately target them the way the "terrorists" do.