| Talkback | |
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Title: | Secular Terror Tactics | |||
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| Name: | Joseph . E | | |||
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| City: | Givatayim | State: | Israel | | |
| While it was popular to talk about the internationalization of terrorism in the 1970s, incentives for terrorist groups to cooperate had more to do with tactical concerns than with ideological motivation. For example, when George Habash, leader of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), assembled representatives in May 1972 from the Irish Republican Army, the Baader Meinhof Gang, and the Japanese Red Army for a meeting in northern Lebanon`s Badawi refugee camp, he sought to trade PLO and Libyan offers of training bases for European and Asian terrorist groups in exchange for facilitation by European groups of PLO operations in Europe.(1) The PFLP`s participation in a January 31, 1974 Japanese Red Army attack on a Shell oil refinery at Pulau Bukom, off the coast of Singapore, was motivated less by PFLP ideology than by an agreement to pay the Japanese Red Army for its May 30, 1972 attack on the Lod (later renamed Ben Gurion) Airport outside of Tel Aviv.(2) (1) Edgar O`Ballance, The Language of Violence: The Blood Politics of Terrorism (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1979), pp. 150-1; Claire Sterling, The Terror Network (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), p. 243. (2) Sterling, The Terror Network, p. 23; O`Ballance, The Language of Violence, p. 145. Contrasting Secular and Religious Terrorism by Jonathan Fine Middle East Quarterly Winter 2008 http://www.meforum.org/article/1826#_ftn27 |
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