The Rational World's Dilemma
MURPHY, RICHARD MCGILL
The Rational World's Dilemma Inside Terrorism By Bruce Hoffman Columbia. 288 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy Contributor, "New Republic," New York "Times Magazine" With the...
...As a journalist traveling through his part of Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, I saw ghostly villages built of thick adobe bricks that a decade of Soviet bombing had splintered into spikes of clay...
...Aum Shinrikyo conceived its ultimately unsuccessful attempts to gas large segments of the Japanese population in similarly apocalyptic terms...
...But as Bruce Hoffman's timely and lucid study demonstrates, global terrorism is a far more complicated matter than the media tend to suggest...
...Edmund Burke solidified its association with the abuse of power in his polemic against the French Revolution, vividly evoking "Thousands of those Hell hounds called Terrorists...
...cruise missiles launched against bin Laden's base in Afghanistan will intimidate the untold number of Islamic militants who, like him, made their mark fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan before they dispersed to Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, and the Persian Gulf, not to mention New Jersey...
...Hoffman is particularly good at illuminating the ambiguities inherent in this debate...
...Robespierre famously proclaimed: "Terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible...
...Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy Contributor, "New Republic," New York "Times Magazine" With the bloody destruction of the U.S...
...Rather than using dramatic, targeted acts of violence primarily to publicize a given cause, these groups want to exterminate their enemies...
...as a result, "terrorism" became detached from the notion of government-sponsored acts...
...Under MenachemBeginin the 1940s, the Irgun used "daring and dramatic acts of violence to attract international attention to Palestine and thereby publicize simultaneously the Zionists, their grievances against Britain and their claims for statehood...
...becomes a sacramental act...
...A former director of terrorism research at the Rand Corporation, Hoffman now runs the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St...
...At times, the networks have crossed the line between reporting and influencing government policy...
...The rash of newspaper, magazine and television pieces on bin Laden may appear to have brought some clarity to the murky picture of terrorist violence in the modern world...
...Andrews University in Scotland...
...Of course, states have always outgunned militants both militarily and rhetorically, with the result that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter...
...Its designation, Hoffman reminds us, derives from the Reign of Terror in France following the revolutionary upheavals of 1789...
...Therein lies Hoffman's most sobering lesson...
...They also helped set a precedent that encouraged other terrorists to use hostages as a bargaining chip...
...Neither is it likely that the U.S...
...white supremacist revolution leads to an all-out race war and global nuclear conflagration, hastening the second coming of Jesus Christ...
...it is therefore an emanation of virtue...
...His book distills the 20 years that he has devoted to examining the phenomenon...
...The networks, for their part, know this sort of coverage affects ratings like cocaine affects lab mice...
...Terrorism" thus originally referred to state-sponsored political violence...
...Unfortunately, we don't know what will...
...By 1988, Hoffman tells us, Nidal's operation had turned its earnings into a $400 million portfolio that included a profitable multinational arms trading company based in Poland...
...A notable example was the Lebanese hostage crisis of the 1980s, when obsessive coverage of the anguished family members forced the Reagan Administration to compromise its policy of not negotiating for the hostages' release...
...administrations have called Iran's support of Hezbollah "state-sponsored terrorism," while the Reagan Administration defined its support of Rightwing Salvadorean death squads as an effort to deflect Communism...
...After taking us on a fast-paced but informative tour of 19th- and early 20thcentury terrorism, Hoffman focuses on the Irgun Z'vai Le'umi and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the two most influential such outfits of the postwar era...
...let loose on the people...
...But the continuing development of terrorism is itself a fast-breaking story...
...Before the Japanese government finally arrested Aum founder Shoko Asahara and seized the group's massive financial assets in 1995, it was well on its way to developing a nuclear device...
...The rules of engagement that once governed relations between, say, the PLO and Western reporters have little relevance to modern religious terrorists such as the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, the Christian Patriots in America, or contemporary Shi'ite Muslim and Jewish extremists in the Middle East...
...In becoming "state-sponsored" guns for hire they abandoned whatever revolutionary pretensions they may originally have had...
...Successive U.S...
...We force the Administration to put their lives above policy...
...Meanwhile, groups such as the Japanese Red Army and the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) built up huge fortunes as mercenary proxies for Syria, Iraq and Libya during the 1980s...
...The State Department, for instance, keeps a "state sponsors of terrorism" list that currently includes Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, and Cuba...
...Instead, in a soft, even voice he seized the opportunity to confirm a jihad against "Jews and the United States...
...embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, Osama bin Laden became the new face of international terrorism...
...The model was later adopted with great success by anticolonial organizations in Algeria and Cyprus...
...In The Turner Diaries, Oklahoma bomber Timothy A. McVeigh's favorite book, a U.S...
...After using the Irgun's weapons against Israel for nearly a decade, the PLO pioneered international terrorism on July 22,1968, when it hijacked an El Al commercial flight en route from Rome to Tel Aviv...
...No, he didn't offer any expressions of regret for the 245 Kenyans and Tanzanians who were killed, let alone the 12 Americans...
...Bearded, turbaned, smiling slightly on occasion, he appeared soon afterward on CNN International in one of his increasing "exclusive" interviews...
...Ironically, though, Begin's best pupil turned out to be Yasir Arafat...
...The August 20 US...
...The French Revolution inspired violent, ill-fated republican uprisings through much of Europe during the 19th century...
...Today, the self-righteous fervor of "Hell hounds" is reminiscent of the French revolutionaries' identification of violence with virtue...
...Terrorism is theater, in one scholar's famous aphorism, and Hoffman devotes considerable attention to how terrorists have often attacked innocent third parties in order to get on Western television...
...retaliatory attack on bin Laden's "Olympic Village of international terrorism," as one Pentagon source referred to it, fell short of taking out the exiled Saudi Arabian multimillionaire...
...As CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl explained: "We are an instrument for the hostages...
...It acquired its modern connotation of being antistate upon becoming associated with nationalist, anarchist and/or Marxist groups such as the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) in Tsarist Russia...
...If the new face of international terrorism is Osama bin Laden or some other wealthy millenarian lunatic, firing off cruise missiles will not deter them...
...In Hoffman's words, "The killing...
...Hence the sterile relativism that permeated United Nations debates on the PLO during the 1970s...
...This should not have surprised anybody...
...It failed to destroy the mujahedin, however, of whom he was one...
Vol. 81 • September 1998 • No. 10
