Fighting Terrorism Page 9
Germany, too, has become an epicenter of militant European Islamic activities, not only including organizations affiliated with the Iranian-Shiite and Sunni Mujahdeen terrorist networks but also those serving as the base for a third militant Islamic terror movement—a fanatical Turkish Islamic terrorism which has found a haven among the two-million-strong Turkish community in Germany. Germany is also the center for Iranian-sponsored European radicalism, with organizations such as the Hamburg Islamic Center serving to circulate conspiracy theories accusing the West of trying to destroy the Islamic world. The Iranians also finance the Union of Islamic Student Associations in Europe (UISA), whose members commit to “defend to the death the Islamic faith and Islamic revolution,” distributing Khomeiniist ideological materials and recruiting new sympathizers for radical Islam. Other groups with a substantial organizational base in Germany include the Hizballah and Hamas.
Turkey too has recently experienced a rash of Islamic terrorist attacks, quite apart from its lingering battle with the Syrian-sponsored terrorism of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). Much of this new anti-Turkish terrorism emanates from enclaves of Turkish Islamic radicals based in Germany. Other terrorism originates from still another source, the Arab-Israeli conflict. Istanbul itself has been the site of repeated acts of terrorism against Jewish and Israeli targets, including the Iraqi-backed 1986 grenade and machine-gun attack of the Abu Nidal organization against the crowded Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, in which twenty-one people died. This was followed in 1995 with a grenade attack on Istanbul’s Beit El synagogue, which fortunately did not claim any lives because two of the grenades failed to explode. Significantly, this last attack was carried out by Hizballah terrorists who have sought, with Iranian support, to make Turkey into a regular staging area for their activities. Within a span of a few years, they have murdered an Israeli embassy security officer, fired rockets at the car of an Israeli official, attempted to assassinate the head of the Turkish Jewish community, Jacques Kimche, and most recently attempted to assassinate Yehuda Yuram, another leader of that same community.
This violence has been supported by German-based Turkish-European organizations such as the Association of Islamic Societies and Communities (ICCB), whose publication Mohammed’s Nation calls for the violent overthrow of the Turkish government and brands the Jews as enemies of humanity. The head of the ICCB, Cemaleddin Kaplan, known as “the Khomeini of Cologne,” was in 1993 ordered deported by the Aliens Office of the city of Cologne, but restrictions on deportation contained in German federal law have allowed the radical spiritual leader to remain in Germany. An even more powerful organization is the Association for a New World Outlook in Europe (AMGT), the European branch of the Turkish Welfare Party (RP). In March 1994, it won 19 percent of the votes in local elections in Turkey, on a platform calling for the (thus far non-violent) establishment of a Turkish Islamic Republic, opposition to the existence of Israel, and the spread of the rule of Islam to the entire world. AMGT has 400 branches throughout Europe and claims 30,000 members.6
Many other examples of Islamic terrorist infiltration of Europe, of both the Shiite and Sunni strains, have largely been ignored in public discourse. Most of the European governments are loath to address the issue and do not do so unless a particularly violent attack takes place. Unlike the battle with their “own” domestic terrorist groups, the uprooting of militant Islamic bases on their soil invariably entails a confrontation with Iran or other important regimes in the Islamic world, something most European leaders prefer to avoid for fear of unpleasant diplomatic and economic consequences. The Islamic terrorist network has for this reason been making rapid inroads into every part of Europe, including Britain, and until recently hardly anyone was paying attention.
The same can be said in large measure about the United States. If America has started to take note of the problem of militant Islamic activities within its borders, this has come about only after particularly spectacular attacks by these groups within the United States itself. In November 1990, an Egyptian immigrant to the United States named El Sayyid Nosair was arrested and charged with murdering Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York.a The subsequent police investigation discovered forty-seven boxes of papers in his home, mostly in Arabic, that the police assumed were “religious materials” of no relevance to the case. They concluded that Nosair was a lone gunman, and never even considered the possibility of a larger conspiracy. It was only in 1993, after the bombing of the World Trade Center, that police returned to these boxes and found them to contain instructions on how to conduct assassinations and attacks on aircraft, as well as formulas for making bombs. In one notebook, Nosair had written: “We have to thoroughly demoralize the enemies of God … by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that constitute the pillars of their civilization, such as the tourist attractions and the high buildings of which they are so proud.” It transpired that Nosair was a follower of the militant Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who had been involved in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and had set up shop in New Jersey in 1990, preaching jihad against non-Islamic Arab governments, Jews, and the West. Other Rahman minions were quickly arrested for the bombing of the Twin Towers—shortly before they were to begin a wave of terror which was to include attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels as well as the United Nations building, and the assassination of prominent Americans. Nosair had been goading them on from his prison cell.
But Nosair and Sheikh Rahman are by no means alone in the business of promoting jihad in the United States. In 1994, a pathbreaking piece of investigative journalism, Jihad in America, was aired by PBS, weaving together the threads of the quiltwork of Islamic terrorist groups and terrorist sponsors which have sprung up across America since the Iranian revolution. These include arms of the Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, and cells of the Sunni Mujahdeen, with centers of activity in Brooklyn, New Jersey, Tampa, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City—and even Oklahoma City. Hiding behind a smoke screen of religious and charitable Islamic groups and small businesses, these organs work in the United States to raise funds, publish incendiary literature, recruit volunteers, issue orders, and lay plans for terrorist missions abroad, and—like the ultra-rightist Patriot movement—train in the use of automatic weapons in preparation for the ultimate battle against the government of the United States. In recent years the United States has played host to at least a dozen known conferences of international Islamic terrorism, where the Islamic militants coordinated their moves and exchanged logistical information. One gathering in Kansas City in 1989, for example, attracted the militant Egyptian Islamic leader Yousef al-Qaradhawi, Tawfiq Mustapha of the Muslim Liberation Party of Jordan, Abdullah Anas of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, Rashid Ghannushi of the Tunisian fundamentalist group Al-Nahdha, and Sheikh Mohammed Siyyam of the Palestinian Hamas. A graduate of one of these conferences was Mohammed Saleh, a Palestinian-American from Chicago who was arrested in Israel in 1993 for financing the purchase of weapons used to murder four people.
In short, elements in the American Muslim community have rapidly developed into the supportive hinterland necessary to serve as at least a partial home base for international terror directed outward, at Israel, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, and other non-Islamic Middle Eastern regimes. Making use of American freedom of speech and religion, of liberal immigration and visitation laws, and of the relative lack of surveillance which they could hardly enjoy in their own countries, these groups have turned the United States into a terrorist haven in its own right. Again, the salient fact is that every one of these subversive or terrorist groups can operate far more freely in the United States than in their home states. While the United States is certainly not a state sponsor of terror, it has nonetheless become an unwitting state incubator of terror.
And it can only be a matter of time before this terror is turned inward against the United States, the leader of the hated West and the country responsible in the eyes of militant Muslims for having created Israe
l and for maintaining the supposedly heretical Arab regimes. Among the great inciters against America has been Abdullah Azzam, one of the religious leaders who transformed the CIA-backed resistance of the Afghani rebels into a successful Islamic jihad against the Soviet Union. In 1989 Azzam was the keynote speaker at what was billed as the First Conference of the Jihad, held at the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn. There, he told the audience: “The jihad, the fighting, is obligatory on you wherever you can perform it. And just as when you are in America you must fast … so, too, you must wage jihad . The word jihad means fighting only, fighting with the sword.” As Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, spiritual leader of the World Trade Center bombers, put it: “The obligation of Allah is upon us to wage jihad for the sake of Allah … We conquer the lands of the infidels and we spread Islam by calling the infidels to Allah, and if they stand in our way, then we wage jihad for the sake of Allah.” Nor are Rahman, Azzam, and their ilk impressed with the might of the United States, now that they have had the experience of defeating the Soviets. As Azzam told a crowd in Oklahoma City in 1988: “After Afghanistan, nothing is impossible for us anymore. There are no superpowers … What matters is the willpower that springs from our religious belief.”7
Thus, while the United States struggles to deal with the rising threat of domestic terrorism at home, a new tide of international terrorism has arisen, constructing a worldwide network of hate, possessing weapons, money, and safe havens of unprecedented scope. With residence in the United States and even American citizenship, these international terrorists have now become domestic terrorists as well, living in America so that they can wage jihad against America. As we have seen, a similar process is well underway in Europe. And it is this wholly new domestic-international terrorism which the United States and Europe now face and which threatens to assume even more alarming proportions as a result of two recent developments far from their shores.
V
The Gaza Syndrome
One of the most important boosts Islamic terrorism has received since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran has been the creation of the PLO enclave in Gaza in the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO.
How did the deal between Israel and the PLO come about? Shortly after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, it had begun to dawn on portions of the Arab world that there was no possibility of destroying the Jewish state by conventional means. That war had pushed Israel’s borders from the outskirts of Tel Aviv to the Jordan Valley forty miles to the east, and from the development towns of the Negev to the Suez Canal one hundred miles to the west. A stone wall a thousand meters high in the form of the Judean-Samarian mountains now provided a formidable barrier to Arab invasion from the east, while the sea and the huge Sinai desert to the southwest shielded Israel’s populated coastline from any threat in the west. It was no longer feasible for the Arab armies to simply thrust across Israel’s borders directly into the heart of the Jewish state, which had before the Six-Day War been a mere nine miles in width at its narrowest point. That Israel was no longer so vulnerable was confirmed in the Yom Kippur surprise attack of 1973, which began with optimal surprise conditions for the Arab armies but quickly brought the Israel Defense Forces to the outskirts of Cairo and Damascus. The recognition that the Arabs would not be able to defeat Israel within its new boundaries gave birth to two competing approaches toward Israel within Arab politics. The first approach maintained that since the Arabs lacked a credible war option against Israel in its present boundaries, they had no choice but to gradually come to terms with Israel’s existence, and eventually to make formal peace with it. It was this line of thinking which, for example, led to the gradual reconciliation between Israel and Jordan, and to the eventual signing of a formal peace between them. Yet simultaneously there developed a second approach, which started out from the same premise but reached a dramatically different conclusion: True, its proponents argued, Israel could not be defeated within its present boundaries; therefore, the proper policy would be to reduce it to its former indefensible frontiers and proceed to destroy it from there. Those who held this view believed that Israel could be made to return to the pre-1967 borders through a combination of relentless terrorist attacks and diplomatic pressure by the Arab states on the West to demand Israel’s withdrawal.
This second school of thought has been championed by the PLO for over twenty years. Indeed, since the PLO formally adopted what it calls the “Phased Plan” at its 1974 Cairo conference, it has consistently been the most outspoken exponent of this view in the Arab world. According to the Phased Plan, the PLO would at first establish its “state of Palestine” on any territory which “would be evacuated by the Zionist enemy.” This new Arab state would then align itself with the other “confrontation states” and prepare for the second stage—the eradication of Israel in a renewed onslaught.1
Until 1992, all Israeli governments, whether led by the Labor Party or by the Likud, sought to strengthen the first approach in the Arab world while discouraging the second, striving to achieve peace with the Arab states while remaining within the improved defensive borders. Though there were differences as to what territorial concessions Israel might be prepared to make, there was a broad consensus against returning to the pre-1967 lines, which had been so fragile as to have provoked the Six-Day War, and against the establishment of a PLO state next to Israel. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the chief patron of the Arab dictatorships, and the Allied victory in the Gulf War created international conditions conducive to reaching an Arab–Israeli peace on this basis—and it was from this consensual position that Israel opened negotiations with all its neighbors at the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991.
But the rise of the Labor government in Israel in June 1992 produced a drastic change in Israeli foreign policy. Naïvely dismissing the PLO’s professed ultimate aims as “propaganda for internal consumption,” the Labor government attempted for the first time to grant many of the PLO’s demands—in the hope of being able to forge an alliance with it. At Oslo, Israel in effect accepted the first stage of the PLO’s Phased Plan: a gradual withdrawal to the pre-1967 border and the creation of the conditions for an independent PLO state on its borders (except for Jerusalem and the other Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, which were left for later negotiation).
The first step in the Israeli withdrawal was the evacuation of the Israeli administration and military presence from Gaza. The Gaza district is a narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean some forty miles southwest of Tel Aviv, with a population of about 800,000 Palestinian Arabs, half of them refugees, and with a history of terrorism which competes with that of Lebanon. Egypt occupied Gaza during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and controlled the district for nineteen years. During this period, the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza were denied Egyptian citizenship—as compared with Palestinian Arabs living in lands captured by Israel and Jordan in 1948, who were immediately granted citizenship by those two countries. But this did not mean that Gaza was not useful to Nasserist Egypt. In the 1950s, Gaza became the foremost base for fedayeen, terrorists backed by the Egyptian government, who staged murderous cross-border raids into Israel resulting in hundreds of deaths and casualties. When Gaza fell into Israel’s hands during the 1967 Six-Day War, the city was in a state of appalling underdevelopment, and continued to be one of the principal centers of terrorist activity until 1970, when a concerted action by Israel uprooted most of the active terrorist cells from the area. While Gaza’s economy grew over 400 percent in the subsequent years of Israeli administration, 2 the most ambitious Israeli efforts to dismantle the refugee camps and move the residents into modern and permanent housing projects met with ferocious resistance from the PLO, which relied on the system of refugee camps to foster anti-Israel hatred and provide the organization with a steady stream of recruits for its terrorist activities. In the end, only about 11,000 families were moved into the new apartment blocks.
Over the years, Gaza has become a
symbol to Israelis as a lair of some of the most rabid Jew-haters in the Middle East. Despite a rich Jewish history, Gaza has become a byword for a hostile and alien place, one of the few bits of land taken by Israel in the Six-Day War of which many Israelis would be pleased to rid themselves. For this reason it was chosen by the Oslo negotiators as the most likely spot to be transferred to the hands of Yasir Arafat as an “empirical” experiment to prove that a PLO state on Israel’s borders would be a step toward peace. Gaza was thus handed over to the PLO along with the village of Jericho (population 15,000), as the first step in implementing the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO. It was there that, in 1994, Yasir Arafat and tens of thousands of his followers arrived, triumphantly waving assault rifles and PLO flags, declaring Arafat to be “President of Palestine,” calling for continued jihad until the liberation of Jerusalem, and imposing their corrupt and despotic order on the Arab residents of the area.
Oslo was, of course, celebrated with unrelieved pomp the world over as a great boon to peace, a breakthrough equal to the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the same city in which negotiations for the PLO–Israel deal were secretly negotiated a year earlier. Under these accords, Israel was to withdraw in stages from all the populated areas in the West Bank and Gaza, and the PLO would set up a regime ostensibly called “autonomy,” but which in effect would have nearly all the trappings and attributes of a sovereign state: its own army (called a “police force”); its own executive, legislative, and judicial branches (all of them controlled by Arafat); its own flag, passports, stamps, and border authorities. The PLO in turn promised to annul the PLO Covenant, which calls for Israel’s destruction, and to act resolutely to quell any terrorist attacks emanating from PLO-controlled areas.