The western world has reacted to the “terrorist” shooting spree in Paris with near-hysteria, immediately intensifying its own lethal violence in the Middle East.

Israel is branding as a wave of “terrorism” the continuing suicidal attacks by hope-deprived Palestinian children armed only with knives and scissors. In the new “peace process” for Syria, Jordan has accepted the thankless task of deciding which of the many armed groups in Syria are “terrorists” and, as such, are to be excluded from the process and bombed.

And Americans have been fiercely debating whether the latest in a long line of domestic gun rampages, carried out by a Muslim married couple, deserves to be deemed an act of “terrorism,” as President Barack Obama termed it during a nationally televised speech last Sunday.

In this context, it may be enlightening to recall the last international effort to define this indefinable word. At the UN’s 60th anniversary summit in September 2005, the 191 member states tried but failed to agree on a convention defining the word “terrorism.” Some commentators actually sounded surprised, even saying that there had been a failure “even” to agree on a definition. No one should have been surprised.

The definition being proposed by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan would have defined “terrorism” as “any action intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or to compel a government or an international organization to carry out or to abstain from any act.”

A fair and reasonable definition, surely. Read it again. Think about it. What are the odds that the US would ever have permitted “terrorism” to be so defined?

For starters, if this proposed definition had been accepted and if George W. Bush and Tony Blair were correct in their repeated assertions that the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks and the 2005 London bombings were “because they hate our freedoms” or some other form of blind, mindless malevolence or sick desire to kill innocent people for the sake of it, then the term “terrorism” could not properly be applied to these events. To make the label fit, Bush and Blair would have had to admit that the motivations were fundamentally political — to intimidate their populations or governments into carrying out major changes in their Middle East policies.

Furthermore, this proposed definition was not limited to acts by “non-state actors.” It would have applied not only to the low-technology violence of the weak but also to the high-technology violence of the strong, which has always been vastly more destructive and deadly.

If this proposed definition had been accepted, even the UN itself would have spent the 12 years between the two wars against Iraq as a “terrorist” organization. How could it be characterized otherwise in light of the “genocidal” sanctions regime against Iraq (so called by two successive coordinators of the UN’s “humanitarian” program in Iraq), which, by UNICEF’s own calculation, had killed half a million Iraqi children under the age of five by 1996 yet which, on the insistence of the US and Britain and in full knowledge of the deadly consequences in the relevant “context,” was maintained until their 2003 invasion?

The word “terrorism” has always been the ultimate subjective epithet, and the popularity and utility of the word for all its users and abusers around the world has been based largely on this subjectivity. Until the world is of one mind as to what constitutes good and evil, right and wrong and justice and injustice, it is inconceivable that the world could agree on a precise and legally binding definition of what actions are always, in all circumstances, under all conditions, on any grounds and regardless of who is doing it to whom, unjustifiable, impermissible and criminal.

However, “terrorism” did not escape unchastised at the 2005 UN summit. In what the BBC then trumpeted as a major success, Blair did get the Security Council to adopt unanimously a resolution urging all states to pass laws making “incitement to terrorism” a crime.

Actually, it cannot have been very difficult to achieve unanimous agreement on this resolution. People may not be able to agree on what “terrorism” is, but, whatever it may be, politicians readily recognize that it is risky to appear less than resolute in opposing this ultimate evil.

The word “terrorism” does not enhance understanding. It stifles rational thought and discussion and, all too often, is used and abused to excuse one’s own illegal and immoral behavior.

Perhaps, rather than seeking an international convention agreeing on what the overused word “terrorism” should mean, it would have been more constructive 10 years ago — and would be more constructive today — to seek an international convention obligating governments, government officials and media to stop using the word entirely, to focus rationally on the nature and causes of violent behavior by both the strong and the weak and to work toward reducing all forms of violent behavior and reversing the accelerating trend toward a more vicious, less free and increasingly fear-infested world.

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The writer is an international lawyer who writes frequently on the Middle East.