Terrorism. What a word, it involves in its meaning probably the worst things that a single word can involve.
Blood, massacre, violence, innocent people, criminals, guns, bombs, feelings like suffering, fear, a terrible feeling of impotence, darkness, and it also involves religion and cultural differences… But wait a second, don’t you think of something else apart from terrorism when you hear these words? I do, I think of war, a word that also involves bad things, really bad things, but it doesn’t really mean the same.. Does it?

Well here’s the point that I want to make, war is not terrorism, terrorism isn’t war, they can be related, in fact they are most of the time nowadays, but they are not the same.

But still, we use both terms in the way that we want, in the way that we are more interested in. For example, when Al Quaeda attacked the United States back in 2001 we were completely shocked, the whole world collapsed, the whole world felt the pain that the attack provoqued, the attack was aimed to innocent people, literally any of us or our families could have been in those planes or in the towers. We became vulnerable, felt insecure, and even scared at times. This was, by pure definition, a terrorist attack.

Same happened in Madrid, Spain, on March 11th, 2004. 4 bombs exploded in several trains, and almost 2 hundred people died, and thousands were injured. This was the toughest attack for us, it was one of the biggest attacks in Europe in the century, aimed at innocent people, what makes it again a terrorist attack.

But what about the action taken by the greatest powers in the smaller countries like Afganistán, Irak, and now Syria? What about the bombings, the criminals, the blood, and the innocent people? And most importantly, what about the cultural and religious differences? We call it war, and in the news we are seeing war as something normal in those countries, we see images of dead children carried by their moms and dads like it’s nothing, and even worse, we see it that way because we see it every other day.

We have our children watching the news with us and when some news like «A girl gets shot when she was walking to school in Pakistan» shows up, they don’t feel identified with it, they don’t care, and they don’t care because we’ve made them that way by showing no emotion or empathy for the victims in those countries.

And the problem is that we don’t care either, we have a very serious lack of empathy when it comes to muslim, arab, or third world countries, or even more specifically, we only care when it comes to Europe, The United States, Canada or Australia. And we are teaching our kids this way. Because it doesnt matter that in school they are learning about everybodie’s equality, (no matter which religion they practice which country they come from or what their economic situation is),THEY SHOULD BE ALL EQUAL.

But they aren’t… right? I mean if they were, we would probably feel some compassion when it comes to give out the news, we would show some feelings whenever we knew about it, same we do when it happens in New York, Madrid or Paris… but we don’t. And if we keep it this way, wars will continue, terrorism will strike again, and we will become less and less human, and by the time we realize the situation those countries are gong through, it will be too late to fix it.