The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., appeared to cement a new consensus on the definition of terrorism. During the Cold War, the term was used as a weapon in the battle between East and West, but with the embedding of al Qaeda in the global public consciousness came a definition of terrorists as stateless religious extremists or ethnic separatists. This consensus may have resulted from the immediacy of the threat rather than knowledge of the direction from which it came, but at least there was a feeling that we knew what terrorism was.