You cannot be providing money and weapons for people who have killed

[The Magistrate]

50. The Real Terrorists, Ma'am

Are persons doing violence to advance a cause the speaker opposes.

That is all the meaning the word carries. It tells you something about the person who says it, but nothing about the people or actions the speaker purports to describe. It does not even tell you the act described as 'terrorism' was atrocity; quite legitimate uses of military force have frequently been dubbed terrorism by those on the other side. It does not even indicate, by any objective standard, that the side the speaker supports has clean hands: regimes busy at atrocity in wholesale lots have been known to call their opponents terrorists.

My preference is for words which actually describe actions, and those who perform them. Hamas is an armed body which views atrocity as a legitimate tool of war, views the populace among which it operates as expendable cover, and does so in full knowledge that doing so is a clear violation of international law. It is an armed body whose leadership believes the death and maiming of myriad Palestinians is outweighed by what political gains they may purchase by it, and has openly declared its aim of establishing a fundamentalist theocracy, once it has eliminated the Jews. At bottom, Hamas is composed of men intoxicated by fantasies of restorative vengeance, and suicidal ideation, cloaked in a buffering of religious ecstacy.