It's quite clearly a political party. If that means you think I'm trying to legitimize them, I'm not, I'm very comfortable in saying I deplore many of their brutal actions and in also calling them a terrorist organisation.
But it is also a political party that participated and won in elections. Whether elections were free or completely closed isn't relevant to basic terminology. Dictatorships have political parties, too. I'm assuming you also wouldn't have called Hezbollah a political party, or the NSDAP, or the CCP? Just because they do shitty things doesn't mean we can't use basic terminology to describe them.
I really respect you withholding comment on anything else for the sake of keeping things on topic. Kudos. I'll make sure to do the same.
But seriously - I have so much to say about what you wrote, but I don't think HN meant for this kind of discussion.
So, back to on topic stuff: is RAILS really dead?