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To the Editor: In their article about the psychological effects of terrorist attacks in Israel, Dr Bleich and colleagues¹ did not develop a meaningful definition of "terrorism." Thus, they reduced a complex situation to an ambiguous general term. The use of words such as "terror" and "terrorist" is prejudicial to scientific inquiry. Such language serves a political point of view, not the needs of medicine or public health.

For instance, the authors stated that "For the purpose of this study a ‘terrorist attack' was operationally defined as any armed attack by a self-proclaimed terrorist group, as categorized by the Israel Defense Forces." We believe that this definition is flawed for 2 reasons. First, any organization involved in promulgating violence against civilians, whether state violence or violence by nonstate groups, would rarely describe itself as "terrorist."

Second, using the Israeli army's categories of what constitutes a terrorist group is hardly an . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Robert Lipton, PhD
Prevention Research Center
Berkeley, Calif

Jess H. Ghannam, PhD
Department of Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco/Mount Zion Medical Center

Joel Beinin, PhD
Department of History
Stanford University
Palo Alto, Calif