From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

This week at the United Nations, a week-long debate over a global strategy to combat terrorism.

The big question, how can the world defeat an enemy it can't define?

British ambassador, Sir Jeremy Greenstock. Increasingly, questions are being raised about the problem

of the definition of a terrorist. Let us be wise and focused about this. Terrorism is terrorism.

But as the saying goes, a saying ever more

fraught with dangerous political implications, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

The delegates at the UN agreed that the mass murders committed in New York and Washington were

acts of terrorism, but there was no agreement on similar acts committed

in other places for other reasons. Malaysian ambassador Hasmi Agam.

Acts of pure terrorism involving attacks against innocent civilian populations, which cannot

be justified under any circumstances, should be differentiated from the legitimate struggles of

peoples under colonial or alien domination and foreign occupation.

So we proceed to the latest installment in our occasional series called Word Watch.

This week, it's terrorism.

Stephen Sloan is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Terrorism and a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He says the roots

of terrorism are as ancient as the idea of empire. We often look at, for start, the zealots,

who used daggers to spread consternation among Roman occupiers during the biblical period,

to spread fear to a broader audience, the general public,

which is a major theme of terrorism because it's aimed at those who survive. And obviously,

...