The bill defines terrorist acts and penalizes terrorists with imprisonment or death. But what is “terrorism” and who is a “terrorist?”

The United Nations has not accepted any strict and universal definition of terrorism but it has used the legal “short term” definition, proposed by terrorism expert A.P. Schmid: “An act of terrorism is the peacetime equivalent of a war crime.”

In November 2004, a U.N. panel described terrorism as any act “intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population and compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.”

We do not have to dwell on examples of terrorist acts perpetrated by clandestine groups to sow violence and death among innocent, non-combatant civilians. We read and hear every day grim examples of the inhumanity that terrorists do to their fellow human beings.

When a threatened country passes an anti-terrorism law, the purpose is to enable the government to protect citizens from terrorists who would sow death and destruction.

But can a government pass an anti-terrorism law that would protect it from its own citizens?

Under the proposed bill, one doesn’t have to kill or maim, or cause chaotic fear in a country or community, to be a terrorist. Tell the government what to do or not to do, and you’re dead or, at least, jailed for life.

Until the proposed law, “disrupting essential services (like traffic) with the intention of coercing or intimidating the government to do or not to do an act,” is terrorism.

The president is given the authority to decide whether the act, or the exercise of a right, is “terroristic” or not and, therefore, immediately punishable with life in prison or death. Never mind the courts.

So who are “terrorists” under Arroyo’s Anti-Terrorism Bill? Who are these people committing “war crimes” during peacetime, in the words of the U.N.?

If you do not approve of the manner the government is being run and you go to the streets to demand that government corrects a perceived mistake or redress a grievance, thereby “coercing government to do or not to do an act,” you are a terrorist, and so forth.

Under the bill, all Filipinos are potential terrorists. That is terrifying in itself.