© Getty imagesOne of the four commuter trains exploded by bomb blasts, 2004 in Madrid, killing 190 people.
However, the narrower Western public perception of a 'terrorist' is someone who attacks civilian targets usually, but not always, in the West (that is, far away from any war zone). This is why US drone strikes on civilians in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, for example, do not attract similar condemnation. Nor is there any condemnation of the Western use of terrorist groups as proxies in the war against the Syrian government. Consequently, groups like al Qaeda, Islamic State, al-Shabab and Boko Haram are labelled 'terrorist', essentially because they are presented as targeting and attacking 'our' civilians (or, as in the case of the girls kidnapped in Nigeria in 2014, ones with whom we are allowed to identify).
In his extensive research in the discipline of critical terrorism studies, Professor Richard Jackson recently concluded that 'every major terrorist attack on Western targets since 2001, including the attacks in Bali, Madrid, London and Boston, has been claimed by the perpetrators to be revenge for Western military intervention in the Middle East. Even the beheadings of Western hostages were justified by Islamic State captors as a response to US bombing. In fact, every major academic study of the past ten years has confirmed that Western military intervention and its policies in the Middle East, including support for the state of Israel, is the primary motivation for anti-Western terrorist attacks. In 1996, a major study by the CATO Institute concluded that U.S. military intervention overseas was the primary driver of anti-American terrorism. The Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism has drawn the same fundamental conclusion.
Comment: The Global Terrorism Database lists more than 140,000 terrorist attacks around the world from 1970 through 2014, domestic and international. These include approximately 58,000 bombings, 15,000 assassinations, 6,000 kidnappings with variables ranging from 45-120 per case from over 4M news articles, 25K news sources. In the past 45 years there have been more than 16,000 terror attacks in Western Europe, an average of more than 350 per year, peaking in 1979. Terror statistics for 2015+ are, so far, not included.