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The Encyclopedia Britannica defines terrorism as "the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective." What distinguishes terrorism from conventional warfare is the degree to which its efforts are focused on creating public panic. While conventional military forces also make frequent use of psychological warfare, including acts of terror and various forms of propaganda, they seek to achieve victory principally through strength of arms. Terrorists, by contrast, often believe that they cannot win the battle by sheer force of arms because they are fighting a technologically and militarily superior foe. Thus they focus their efforts on covert actions designed to strike the constant fear of unpredictable violence into the hearts of all - particularly civilians. This has led some social scientists to refer to terrorism as the "weapon of the weakest." Attacking civilians has been the methodology, for example, of the thousands of Palestinians who have murdered and maimed Israeli men, women, and children in crowded markets, schools, restaurants, train stations, plazas, nightclubs, and buses, among other places. These terrorists pursue their political goals by striving to make life unbearable for the population at large - and thereby winning political concessions. In some cases, of course, terrorism is a tool of the mighty - such as when it has been the official policy of totalitarian states like Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Those states used unjustified arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution to create a climate of intense fear, and to encourage subservience to the declared political, social, and economic goals of the state.