Defining terrorism

The UN has been striving for decades to find a wording for terrorism which, instead of "all its forms and manifestations", narrows down to a specific profile of violence which can be condemned regardless of the circumstances. It blocks the possibility of referring terrorist acts to an international court, as for genocide and other war crimes; it leaves individual countries free to outlaw activity which they choose to classify as terrorism, perhaps for their own political convenience; and crucially it enabled the Bush administration to conjure in the public mind parallels between the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. The vocabulary of terrorism has become the successor to that of anarchy and communism as the catch-all label of opprobrium, exploited accordingly by media and politicians.
However my personal definition of terrorism would be, Terrorism is the cruelest of crimes; it feeds off the personal suffering by luring governments into actions that abandon hard-earned freedoms of modern civilization. Gargantuan budgets committed to security mock the lives lost in poor countries to preventable disease and hunger. The dark complexity of suicide attacks has exposed inadequacies of security forces, moral philosophers, psychologists and theologians alike. Failing to take advantage of the universal revulsion at the events of September 2001, the "war on terror" has instead magnified the global threat of terrorism.