History of Terrorism: Munich 1972 and 2016

The long history of German incompetence in the face of Islamist terrorism

 

We all know about Germany under Angela Merkel deciding to admit about a million immigrants from lands where jihadism, Sharia law, terrorism and hatred of women, Jews and gays are endemic.

Most of know that on New Years’ Eve last, some 1000 of the recent immigrants, predominantly young males from a culture of rape, began sexually assaulting hundreds of German young women in Cologne.

Fewer know that German police took days to acknowledge the extent of the mass rapes and sexual attacks and in this they and the German media have been following the lead of Sweden whose police and media, according to a recent article in Britain’s The Spectator, have been actively covering up the facts on the nature and extent of Muslim sexual attacks on their women.

German police declared within one day that the German-Iranian shooter who killed 9, including children, in the Munich mall attack this week acted alone, and inferred that this was mental illness not terrorism.

This happened during a period where police and security services were on “high alert” due to information about a possible terrorist attack.   Unlike most shooters who are killed on site as they continue to shoot, this shooter was found a kilometer away from the mall, and police quickly said that not only did he act alone but that it was suicide.   He had been walking around with a Glock 17 semi-automatic handgun and 300 rounds of ammunition in his rucksack.   I ask whether it is reasonable to accept such a fast conclusion from police that it was suicide and not terrorism.

I do not understand why the country that makes Mercedes cars that can drive themselves cannot, during a period of high alert, protect public gatherings, or find a shooter in a dense urban environment and must rely on the killer committing suicide a kilometer away – unless of course your ideology says all Muslims are culturally equal to all Western Europeans and that it is appropriate to accept a million mostly unvetted, mostly Muslim, migrants during wartime (radical Islam has declared war, and Hollande accepts this but not Obama and it would seem that Merkel does not accept it either).  The ideology of tolerance (which I term “tolerism” in my book of that title) says that tolerance and compassion and empathy, and yes, “submission” to a million demographic soldiers of the Islamic retaking of Europe, will somehow ease the problem.

The perpetrator shouted, “Allahu Akbar” —  the terrorist battle-cry.   Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae, however, told a news conference there were no indications the gunman had links with ISIS, identifying the attack as a “classic shooting rampage” and not terrorism.    Why do we insist that we are only worried about links to ISIS and not links to cultural jihadism and conquest?

Police were quick to emphasize that the shooter also shouted that he was a “German”, all but ignoring that he, or perhaps his parents, was, or were, from Iran, the major terrorist exporting nation in the world.   Even if he was not directed by Iranian terrorists, one cannot say that he was not inspired by the constant anti-western propaganda and warlike statements coming out of Iran.   One would think that Germany, in light of its crimes during the Nazi era but also due to its role in selling chemicals to Iraq and Syria for its chemical weapons program, and, as disclosed in a report by the World Nuclear Organization, providing 24% of the parts for the Iranian Busheir 1 nuclear plant, be more diligent in pursuing world peace by stopping its tolerance for Islamic warmongers.

The purpose of this article is to re-examine the 1972 terrorist attacks in Munich and reflect on the Munich mall Islamist terrorist attack . For it is my contention that a review of the facts will disclose that the undue tolerance and political correctness sweeping Europe has made it very difficult to protect Germans, as well as their visitors, from Islamist violence.

Let us examine the historical context of the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.  Eight Palestinians from a terrorist organization called Black September, a group within Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and PLO, took Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics, and, in the course of the attack, 11 Israelis and one German police officer were killed.

While terrorist attacks have become very common, we must remember that the Munich massacre was something much more unique at the time.  Author Steven Reeve, who did a 2001 study of the attack and its aftermath, writes that Munich was one of the most significant terror attacks of recent times, in that it “thrust the Palestinian cause into the world spotlight, set the tone for decades of conflict in the Middle East, and launched a new era of international terrorism.”   And as Arab Muslims continued to find terrorism useful to attain the support of Europeans and the United Nations, then it was sure to follow that terrorism would be used against the West.

Accordingly, it must be understood how incompetent was the response of the German authorities and how mild was the response of the International Olympic movement.

Two of the Israelis were killed immediately upon the hostage-taking.  The hostage-takers then demanded the release and transfer to Egypt of a large number of Palestinians and others jailed in Israel.   Israel’s response was absolute – no negotiations with terrorist murderers.   Israel offered to send a special forces unit to Germany to try to free the hostages, but Germany refused.  Instead Germany undertook an operation which was so incompetent that it would be laughable if the consequences hadn’t been so tragic.  (We must credit the Germans, however, with the moral step of offering to the Palestinians a substitution of some high-ranking Germans in place of the Israelis, which the Palestinians refused.)

First, the Germans dispatched to the Olympic village some members of the border-police, completely untrained in any sort of counter-terrorist response, and without any plan of attack.  They took up positions, awaiting orders that never came.  Second, German television camera crews starting filming the police squad on the roof of a building, and once the terrorists saw the footage on television, and showed they knew where the police were, the operation was abandoned.

The German authorities pretended to give in to the terrorists’ demand for transportation to Cairo;  but instead of taking them to the international airport, the Germans transported them to a military airbase, where they planned to attack them.

The Germans selected five snipers, but none of them had any special training and were only chosen because they shot competitively on weekends.    A Boeing jet was positioned on the tarmac, and the Germans placed five or six armed police, dressed as flight crew, in the plane.  They were to overpower the terrorists who would be inspecting the plane, and the other snipers were to kill the remainder of the terrorists who would be in the helicopters which delivered them from the Olympic site.  The armed police, however, again had no counter-terrorism training, and at the last moment just as the helicopters arrived, the police panicked and voted among themselves to abandon their mission, which they did, without even contacting their central command.   When the terrorist leaders inspected the empty jet, they knew they had been duped, and a chaotic scene ensued.  But the German snipers, who had no radio contact with each other, and hence no coordination of their efforts, were not even equipped with steel helmets or bullet-proof vests.  In the end all of the hostages were killed, and all but three of the terrorists.

After a one-day suspension, the Games continued.  At a memorial service, IOC President Avery Brundage spoke about the strength of the Olympic movement, but chose not to refer to the slain Israeli athletes!  And the Arab nations objected to a plan to fly flags at half mast!

The bodies of the five Palestinians who were killed were, for some reason, delivered to Libya, where they received heroes’ funerals with full military honors.   The three surviving terrorists were jailed, but less than two months later, a German Lufthansa jet was hijacked and the Germans quickly traded two of the terrorists for release of the hijacked plane.

We should understand that 9/11 and the various terrorist attacks in Europe are part of the same problem that Israel faces.  Sadly, the European Left (and increasingly the American Left) seeks to distinguish the two and continues to work to sacrifice Israel to the Islamist beast, in the hopes that it will be sated and not come after them.

The tolerant elites of Europe have ignored all history, and welcomed some one million migrants into Germany alone, from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and other dysfunctional Muslim countries.    Britain’s Express newspaper (consisting of the Daily Express and the Sunday Express) reported in February on a leaked government report that the refugees to Germany (numbering some one million people) committed some 200,000 crimes last year!   Most were minor crimes, but some were murders, assaults, thefts, sexual assaults, etc.   It takes a special kind of ideology of naïve faith in tolerance (which I term tolerism) to destroy the safety of your own people in favor of some notion of “rights” of migrants, most of whom were inadequately vetted.

Significantly, German security forces have been on alert since a teenage migrant stabbed and injured five people on a train in Bavaria on Monday, in an attack claimed by so-called Islamic State.

The authorities had warned of the danger of further incidents.  Yet, to the best of my knowledge, German authorities are not implementing what Israel did way back in 2001, where those entering malls are checked for weapons by highly trained security guards.   Not checking, not understanding the difference between mental illness and cultural incitement, 24 hour conclusions ruling out “terrorism”, are all signs of incompetence.  Incompetence to save Israeli athletes in 1972 and incompetence to save their own people in 2016.  And the reason for the incompetence is the foolish ideology adopted by the children and grandchildren of Nazi murderers that the problem of terrorism was a deserved problem of the Israeli Jews and that it wasn’t their problem.

Read the Original Article at FrontPage Mag

Deconstructing Terrorism: Truck Attacks – A Frightening Tool of Terror With A History

By Peter Bergen

It used to be that we worried about truck bombs. Now we have to worry about trucks used as weapons.

The tactic has been adopted by jihadist terrorists in the West, including in the United States, but fortunately the lethality of these attacks has been relatively low — until Friday’s attack in Nice that has killed at least 84.

The tactic has been a long time coming.

Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch encouraged its recruits in the West in its 2010 webzine, Inspire, to use trucks as a weapon. An article headlined “The Ultimate Mowing Machine” called for deploying a pickup truck as a “mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah.”

In September 2014, an ISIS spokesman similarly encouraged such attacks, saying of ISIS’ enemies, “run him over with your car.”

A month later, on October 20, 2014 Canadian Martin Rouleau Couture, who had traveled to Turkey in what appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to join ISIS in neighboring Syria, ran over two soldiers in Quebec, killing one and injuring another.

Also in 2014, there were two such car attacks in France in the cities of Nantes and Dijon, though the motives of the attackers, one of whom shouted “Allah Akbar!” after one of the attacks, are murky. In both cases the assailants had long histories of mental illness, according to the BBC.

The tactic has also been used in the United States. In 2006, Mohammed Taheri-azar, an American-Iranian,drove an SUV into an area crowded with students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later said that that the United States government had been “killing his people across the sea” and he was taking revenge and he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.” Luckily the attack killed no one but it did injure nine.

A year later, a pair of British terrorists opposed to the Iraq war rammed their Jeep into the arrivals area of Glasgow Airport, but killed no one.

We don’t know enough yet to say what prompted the Nice attack. But what the the attack in Nice shows is that we are now in an era when lone terrorists are becoming increasingly lethal.

Recall the attack at the Orlando nightclub that killed 49 in June carried out by a single gunman, Omar Mateen.

Until Thursday the most lethal terrorist attack in the West carried out by a lone terrorist was by Anders Breivik, a Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in 2011.

The death toll in the Nice attack already stands at 84, making the Nice attack the deadliest ever attack carried out by a lone terrorist in the West.

(Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb in 1995, but he was aided in every respect of the attack by co-conspirator Terry Nichols who is now serving a life term. There is no indication so far that the Nice attacker operated as part of a terrorist group.)

This will have important implications for how we conceive of the danger of lone terrorists in the West going forward. Law enforcement authorities in the States and other Western countries will have to consider the vulnerabilities to vehicular attacks of large, packed crowds of the kind that we saw jamming the waterfront in Nice celebrating their national holiday on Thursday.

Read the Original Article at CNN

 

Guerilla Warfare History: The IRA and ‘Fantasy Troubles’

A lot of articles, books, documentaries and news pieces have been produced over the last two decades exploring the origins of the Peace Process in the North of Ireland, and none more so than in the murky world of Britain’s Dirty War. It has become de rigueur in certain British nationalist circles (and amongst their sympathisers) to claim that it was “the Brits wot won it!” thanks to the alleged penetration of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) by various branches of the British intelligence services. It was not boots on the ground that brought about the peace, or even the “hit squads” of the infamous Special Air Service (SAS), but rather “human intelligence” – and in particular informers and double-agents.

The successful penetration of PIRA at all levels by British spies and agents, from top to bottom, helped the British to turn the organisation around, point it in the direction they wanted it to go, convinced it there was nothing further to be gained by continuing the armed struggle, and set it off on the path of peace (a few bumps and hiccups along the way not withstanding). Or so the story goes. Some even go so far as to claim that the British succeeded in a complex, decades-long strategy of bringing Irish Republicans into the governance of the north-eastern part of Ireland on behalf of the British – a masterstroke indeed.

If true.

This particular narrative has gained legs in recent years with the dramatic unmasking of several senior British agents at high levels within the Republican Movement, in both the military and political wings. Not simply the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army but Sinn Féin itself was compromised, it would seem. So the cries went up: the Brits knew everything! The Brits ran everything! The whole last decade of the war, the whole peace process itself was nothing more than a sham.

All of which is complete and utter nonsense.

Read the Remainder at Ansionnachfionn

Cold War Files: Codename – Chilbom

Shortly after 9:30 on the morning of September 21, 1976, a light blue Chevy Chevelle carrying three passengers moved along Washington, D.C.’s Embassy Row, merging into the flow of commuter traffic around Sheridan Circle. The man in the driver’s seat was Orlando Letelier, an economist and fellow at a left-leaning think tank, the Institute of Policy Studies. In the passenger’s seat beside him was 25-year-old Ronni Moffitt, a fundraiser at IPS, and behind her was her husband of four months, Michael Moffitt, also 25, a researcher working with Letelier on issues related to the future of Letelier’s native Chile.

It was a small miracle that Letelier was there in Washington that morning, working at IPS, commuting from the house he shared in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and four sons. Six years earlier, he had been a close confidante to Salvador Allende, the democratic socialist elected president of Chile in September 1970. For two years, Letelier served as Allende’s ambassador to the United States. In May 1973, he became foreign minister, and three months later, as right-wing resistance to Allende was intensifying, he was appointed defense minister, in charge of a military establishment openly hostile to the president.

On September 11, 1973, that hostility erupted into a deadly coup led by military leader General Augusto Pinochet. Allende’s three years in office had been marked by intense social instability, fomented in part by the United States, which since 1962 had been covertly financing newspapers, political parties, and, eventually, neo-fascist paramilitary groups as part of its covert war against leftist political movements in Latin America. That morning tanks surrounded Moneda Palace, the seat of Chile’s presidency. Just before noon, the Chilean air force began strafing the building. A firefight ensued between military forces and pro-Allende snipers positioned around the palace. Rather than be taken prisoner or forced into exile, Allende, holed up in La Moneda, took his own life.

Over the next few months, more than 1,200 people—leftist politicians and government officials, union leaders, activists, and students—were summarily executed. Many were arrested, brought to detention centers, and then murdered, their bodies flung across Santiago thoroughfares and dumped along urban riverbanks. On the morning of the coup, Letelier rushed to the Defense Ministry to try to restore order. In an interview published posthumously inPlayboy in 1977, Letelier said that the moment he entered the ministry, he “felt a gun in my back” and was quickly “surrounded by ten or twelve men,” all pointing their weapons at him. He was taken into military custody. That night, from his holding room, Letelier watched nearly two dozen executions in the palace courtyard. At 5 a.m., he heard a commotion outside his room. “Now it’s the turn of the minister,” one soldier said. About 30 minutes later, a group of armed men entered his room, one carrying a blindfold. Letelier knew immediately what was coming. While he was being led to the courtyard, however, an argument ensued between two officers over who was in charge. Letelier remembered one of his captors saying, “You’re lucky. They won’t give it to you, you bastard.”

Instead he was flown with other prominent political prisoners to a detention center on Dawson Island, a frigid, forlorn place in the Strait of Magellan, closer to the tip of Antarctica than to Santiago. Letelier was beaten, threatened with execution, and forced to perform hard labor in subzero conditions. He remembered Dawson as “an inaccessible, frozen hell.”

After three months there, Letelier, malnourished and greatly weakened, weighed only 125 pounds. Another six months went by before he was transferred to a less punitive facility north of Santiago. A year after the coup, he was suddenly released from military custody and sent to Venezuela, where the powerful governor of Caracas had been lobbying for his release. He rejoined his family there and was offered the research position at IPS, which was hostile to the junta and critical of U.S. intervention in Latin America.

Read the Remainder at Atavist

History of Terrorism: The Lessons From the Entebbe Raid Still Relevant 40 years Later

July 4, 1976, was a special day for America, Israel and international terrorism.

In America, it was the bicentennial, the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. For Israel, it was a day of redemption, after its commandos had rescued 102 hostages from pro-Palestinian hijackers at Entebbe airport, Uganda.

Alas for terrorists, July 4 was a black day. Now it was their turn to be terrorized. Every time they hijacked a plane, they would have to ask themselves: was there a commando team lurking in the darkness, waiting to storm the aircraft in a blaze of gunfire?

But on that Fourth of July in 1976, there was nothing for the terrorists to fear. Looking back forty years, it’s depressing how little things have changed. Today it is suicide bombers, but in the 1970s, the terror spectaculars were airliner hijackings. Wikipedia lists forty-four hijackings during that decade, committed by an assortment of Palestinians, European and Japanese radicals, African-American militants, Croatians, Kashmiris, Lithuanians, criminals, lunatics, and anyone else with a grievance, gun or grenade. Some hijackers surrendered; others found sanctuary in places like Cuba and Algeria. But rarely did police or soldiers attempt to storm the aircraft and rescue the hostages.

So when four terrorists—two Palestinians and two German leftists—hijacked Air France Flight 139 as it departed Athens on June 27, 1976, they had every reason to feel the odds were in their favor. First, they successfully took over the Airbus A300, which carried 246 passengers, many of them Israeli and non-Israeli Jews. The aircraft first landed in Libya, and then flew to to Entebbe airport in Uganda.

Better news awaited them there. Ugandan president Idi Amin—a living example of why syphilis and statesmanship don’t mix—allowed three more terrorists to join their comrades. He also deployed his troops around the airport to protect the terrorists rather than the hostages.

A planeful of Jewish passengers held hostage thousands of miles from Israel, and guarded by armed soldiers as well? What more could a terrorist ask for?

In the end, the terrorists didn’t get what they asked for, which was the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. But they got what they deserved. A hundred-strong Israeli rescue force, flying aboard four C-130 transports, flew 2,500 miles to Entebbe. They landed on the runway, neutralized the Ugandan soldiers, killed the terrorists, rescued the hostages and blew up Idi Amin’s MiG fighters so they couldn’t shoot down the unescorted C-130s. The cost was three hostages accidentally killed by Israeli fire (a seventy-five-year-old woman was later murdered by a vengeful Amin). The one Israeli soldier killed was Yoni Netanyahu (elder brother of the current Israeli prime minister), shot by a Ugandan guard. Tragic losses, to be sure, but the toll could have been much worse.

Entebbe is one of those textbook military operations that will be studied until the end of time. Not only has the rescue been the subject of multiple movies and books, but American planners kept Entebbe in mind when they devised the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011.

Brilliant endeavors always look easy in hindsight. Detractors would later say that the Israelis were lucky to be fighting Ugandans led by a buffoon who fancied himself a king of Scotland and blamed his defeat on Israeli “nuclear hand grenades.” It is true that the Ugandan army wasn’t Hezbollah. It is also true that some of the rescue operations that Entebbe spawned haven’t worked out, notably America’s disastrous 1980 Iran hostage rescue, and a bloody Egyptian attempt to storm a hijacked airliner in Cyprus in 1978. Had the Israeli operation failed, it would have gone down as one of history’s most harebrained ideas.

I believe there are three big lessons from Entebbe. The first is that that brains are just as important as technology, something that the Pentagon (and today’s Israeli military) would do well to remember. Entebbe was a remarkably low-tech operation. No drones, GPS or soldiers dressed like Iron Man. The C-130s, jeeps and Uzi submachine guns had more in common with World War II–era equipment than digital twenty-first-century gear.

The second is that chutzpah pays. Israel in 1976 had a reputation for military skill, but it was not the high-tech military power it is today. Had the United States mounted such an operation, there might have been aircraft carriers and B-52s in support. If the Israeli operation went wrong—if a C-130 had crashed, or the commandos been pinned down by enemy fire—they would have been stranded in the African jungles 2,500 miles and an eternity away from help. Who would have expected little Israel to dare attempt such a coup?

But the biggest lesson involves fear. Terrorism is all about creating fear, or more accurately, helplessness. The message of terrorists is that they can strike us at our airports and supermarkets and concert halls, and there is nothing we can do about it. Therefore we must submit to their demands or submit, like a dog that has been kicked too much.

I think that Entebbe has been immortalized not just for its military brilliance, but also because it speaks to something more visceral. It reassures us that we’re not powerless.

Not that counterterror commando raids are the total solution: America, Israel, Britain, France and other nations have killed plenty of terrorists, and still the bombs go off.

And as today’s world reels under massacres in Paris, Orlando and Istanbul, it is too easy to feel helpless. Too easy succumb to the despair that suicide bombers and murderous gunmen, just like airplane hijackers in the 1970s, are a fact of life, to be accepted like the weather.

Entebbe is a reminder that the only people who can make us feel helpless are ourselves.

Read the Original Article at National Interest