ACTIVE Vs PASSIVE terrorism- Which is worse?

For long we have considered only the persons responsible for the actual terror acts as terrorist, while in reality they are just the tip of the iceberg. More dangerous according to me are the PASSIVE terrorist who support them & provide them the moral support & martyr / hero status. It is the Passive terrorist who provedes the breeding ground for the ACTIVE terrorist who causes the actual terror attacks.

A very important point everybody fails to appreciate while studying terrorism is that the word civilian is actually a misnomer. Most often these so called civilians are not innocent. They are PASSIVE terrorists who provide the active logistical, financial, social & moral support to the ACTIVE terrorists who carry out the attack. So these civilians are as much a part of the terrorist network as the active attackers are.

For example look at the pictures in Lebonan. Their women & children support the Hizbolla by all means. They provide them the social sanction to  carry their activities in the society, the hideouts, money if needed, they worship the terrorists as heros & martyrs.  They let the active terrorists  hide their arms in their kids room or bed room & take it out, attack Israel & hide it back where a kid or a women might be sleeping. Now what does Israel do. Its radars detect the geographical origin of rockets lauch & pound it with bombs. The women & the kids get killed & their dead photos are splashed all over the world as civilian casualties !!!!!!!

Now the active terrorists will further use these photographs to spread their propoganda & cry that israel is hurting their women & children. Its a vicious circle.

Another analogy is should the supporters of Osama Bin Laden be considered innocent civilians. It is their support which enables Osama to surivive despite combined international effort. They are more dangerous than Osama, because once Osama is finally dead, they can make him a martyr & create ten new Osamas.

Now you decide which is worse. ACTIVE terrorism or PASSIVE terrorism.

So, what we need is another Sherman to do another March to the Sea, and break the spirit of the terrorists just as Sherman broke the spirit of the non-fighting slaveholders.

I agree with Vivek that passive terrorists are potentially more dangerous than th active ones. But we need to remember that there would not be any passive terrorists without active ones spreading "the message". Hence if we destroy the actice cells, the cancer should stop spreading. Yet that would not deminish the risk of some attention-deprived hot head starting another cell. Hence we need to concentrate on 1) stopping whatever it is that causes the cells to exist in the first place, and 2) destroy as many of such active cells as possible, and 3) teach the passive terrorists that their support of active terrorism will only cause them to be hurt in the process. We also need to stop the liberal media from publishing such nonesense of "civillians" getting hurt if these "civillians" are actually passively involved. The UN and EU are foremost amongst such criminals who like to concentrate on such "humane" issues. Poor John Bolt is the only figure in the Security Council that understands this and tries to do something about it, whilst France (,Germany) and Russia are still caught up resolving issues from the Middle Ages.

Any kind /form of terrorism is equally bad.