[Udik]

Terrorism is sometimes the only weapon of those who fight against a much more powerful enemy. This doesn't mean that all terrorism is justifiable, but arresting your thought at words such as "terrorist" or "dictatorship" or "democracy" is silly. These are just arbitrary labels.

[meowface]

Ruthless, arbitrary slaughter of innocent civilians en masse is never justified, even if you are being oppressed.

[Udik]

No? Ruthless and arbitrary slaughter of civilians is instead justified by the presence of a military objective spatially located in the vicinity? The result is always the same: in order to obtain some result, you knowingly sacrifice civilians. Be the result destroying infrastructure, forcing a reaction, or producing a deterrence. Some armies have the means to hit the best military objectives directly, others have to rely on indirect effects. Would you qualify the Dresden bombings as military acts or terrorism? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Somebody said "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". The relation between war and terrorism is approximately the same.