The Social World

Tag: Terrorism

  • Do Jews have a future in Britain? 

    Do Jews have a future in Britain? 

    I was on my way to synagogue yesterday when I got news that was surprising and unsurprising at the same time. That there had been an attack at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur was a shock, but only the location and the timing. The fact that terror had struck our community felt like the confirmation of our worst fears – and something that was grimly predictable. 

    For as long as I can remember, Jewish life in the UK has been closely guarded and protected. My childhood synagogue in the leafy London suburb of Surbiton was behind locked gates with security guards posted outside when anyone was in the building. My Jewish newspaper office today has similar protections and an address we’re told must never be made public. Every kosher shop in North London has a permanent security presence, twice or three times that of a supermarket in a dodgy area. 

    British Jews are always watching over their shoulders, silently clocking the escape routes out of synagogues and constantly feeling like a target when we congregate. We are a group that, by virtue of existing, is targeted. Jewish schoolchildren are told to change their uniforms when going home on public transport, observant Jewish men hide their kippahs with baseball caps when on the tube, everyone does the little things they can to try and feel safe. 

    All of this of course, was true before October 7 and it will be true for a long time after this war ends. But there has been a remarkable uptick in the last two years. The right-thinking consensus that anti-Semitism was bad is crumbling before our eyes, as the horseshoe theory that sees us hit from the far-left and the far-right becomes stronger every day.

    The Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization that collects data on anti-Semitism in Britain has recorded an unprecedented rise in all manner of attacks on British Jews, from casual anti-Semitic remarks to violent assaults on visibly Jewish people, buildings and communities. Just last month, a man was arrested in North London for a spate of attacks where he smeared his own excrement on synagogues. 

    The reaction to what’s happening in the Middle East is coming home to affect British Jews, making us feel like outsiders in a country that we’ve lived in and loved for centuries. I see it all the time in my own life and work. The social media channels of the Jewish Chronicle are inundated with hateful, anti-Semitic comments every day that have nothing to do with Israel. I’ve seen anti-Semitic graffiti appear all over my neighborhood in south London and I’ve been accused of “killing kids” at a friend’s birthday party by someone I had just met. 

    The nature of anti-Semitism means that it is ever-present, always under the surface. And it has been allowed to fester. Partially by a government that through its own poor politicking is pandering to extremists in its own party, but also by a media so desperate to raise the temperature of debate in Britain, that it forgets that Jewish people’s safety is at stake. Anti-Semites across the UK and in public life have been allowed to grow in confidence, to march on the streets of London, a city that Jews have thrived in, with placards of blood-drenched swastikas and depictions of Jewish leaders with horns. 

    Britain has always been seen as different to the rest of Europe when it comes to Jewish life. For years, our community has looked at violence in places like France, where Islamist terror attacks against Jews are a regular fixture and thought, “That wouldn’t happen here”. 

    But now it has. The events of yesterday will be a scar on Britain’s Jews, in the same way that the Tree of Life shooting, and the HyperCache attack, and the Boulder firebombing forever changed those communities. The Jews of Manchester and those across the UK will remember Heaton Park for years to come. There will also be soul-searching. Does this mean we should all go to Israel, to live among a different type of Islamist threat? What can we do to prevent this happening ever again? 

    There’s a certain feeling among British Jews that in any country other than Israel we are not in control of our own destiny, that our safety in the UK or in any other country is dependent on the government of the day listening to our pleas and taking our security seriously. To the credit of the police, they acted quickly to protect the Jews of Heaton Park. But many Jews today will be feeling that the attack was grimly predictable, and wondering why the government or the police allowed this country to become a place where Islamists’ toxic ideas and hatred of Israel are allowed to take the lives of British Jews. 

    Killing Jews in Manchester or London or Paris or Washington DC will not bring this war to an end. Not a single Palestinian life is saved by the taking of one from a synagogue worshipper. Yesterday’s attack feels like a turning point. If British Jews can be killed simply for being Jewish, then do the rest of us have a future here?

  • Why Chicago Teachers Union lionized a terrorist

    Why Chicago Teachers Union lionized a terrorist

    When I first saw the Chicago Teachers Union’s post honoring Assata Shakur, I thought it was a headline from the Babylon Bee. But no, this one was real, and beyond parody.

    The union, entrusted with educating Chicago’s children, used its official social media account to mourn the death of a convicted cop killer, calling her a “revolutionary fighter” and “leader of freedom.”

    Shakur was found guilty of murdering New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973 and later escaped prison, landing on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List with a $2 million bounty. To make matters worse, CTU Vice President Jackson Potter doubled down, declaring on X that “Assata was a freedom fighter!”

    The tone-deaf post is a glaring sign that the CTU can’t be trusted to educate children. While the union wastes time lionizing a terrorist, Chicago Public Schools are failing spectacularly. In 55 schools, not a single child is proficient in math. Taxpayers shell out about $30,000 per student annually, yet the system squanders that money on everything but effective teaching. It’s almost as if the CTU is competing for the title of most unhinged organization on Earth, alienating reasonable members in the process.

    This post should serve as a wake-up call for Chicago teachers who don’t share these extreme views. If your values aren’t reflected in honoring a murderer, why keep funding the radicals at the top?

    Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, unions can no longer force public school teachers to pay dues, as it violates their First Amendment rights. Rational educators who simply want to teach can opt out and stop handing over their hard-earned paychecks to bosses like CTU President Stacy Davis Gates.

    Teachers can now get free personal liability insurance through the Teacher Freedom Alliance. That way, they keep more of their own money, stay protected, and cut off support for this insanity.

    Their post isn’t a one-off mistake. Stacy Davis Gates declared earlier this year at the City Club of Chicago that children in public schools belong to her union. Her X bio even proclaims, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” But if kids truly belonged to the union, their leadership would be in jail for child abuse, given the horrifying academic outcomes.

    Remember 2022, when the CTU voted to strike and keep schools closed long after it was clear reopenings were safe? Those closures harmed children academically and emotionally. The union deleted a post claiming the push to reopen was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” Meanwhile, CTU board member Sarah Chambers was caught vacationing in Puerto Rico, thousands of miles away, while railing against returning to work.

    Stacy Davis Gates labeled school choice “racist,” yet she sends her own son to a private school. The CTU also reposted a video of a mock guillotine outside Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s house, stating they were “completely frightened by, completely impressed by and completely in support of wherever this is headed.”

    As an affiliate of Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, the CTU mirrors national union extremism. Chicago Public Schools have morphed into a jobs program for adults rather than an education system for kids. Staffing has ballooned 20 percent since 2019, even as enrollment dropped 10 percent.

    The CTU operates more like a political machine than an educational advocate. It poured $2.4 million into electing former organizer Brandon Johnson as mayor. Now, Johnson holds the highest unfavorable rating in Chicago mayoral history, with nearly 80 percent viewing him negatively.

    Teachers deserve better representation. Parents deserve schools that prioritize learning over ideology. And children deserve a chance to succeed, not a union that honors killers while failing them in the classroom. It’s time for teachers to hold the union cartel accountable by opting out and starving the beast from the inside.

  • Don’t project your lifestyle agendas onto Tyler Robinson

    Charlie Kirk, conservative commentator and essential piece of the Trumpworld media ecosystem, is dead, allegedly at the hands of an individual whose inner life has, needlessly, been the subject of conservative speculation for the past few days. Seemingly, every faction of the American right has their own explanation as to how this young man might have been inspired to commit such an atrocity. Many of these are myopic but perhaps have a kernel of truth to them. Others are plainly wrong. The worst of them play right into the hands of the left, and deserve serious reconsideration.

    Details about Tyler Robinson, the suspected gunman, continue to pour in. He was an apparently accomplished academic student (that is, until he dropped out of college and enrolled in vocational school) and had a live-in transgender lover, but besides this biographical details are sparse. He is consistently described by former classmates and teachers as respectful, somewhat quiet, and intelligent. The worst that’s said of him is that he is socially awkward, but the man exhibited no behaviors that would indicate any particular mental malaise or sociopathy. In this way, Robinson becomes a blank slate for agenda-pushing conservatives to depict as their “problem child,” representative of whatever social ill they tend to fixate on.

    One narrative circulating among the American right is the idea that Robinson was radicalized by his time at university. It is not wrong to identify America’s colleges and universities as militantly left-wing institutions. The ideological bent of college professors needs no introduction. Even still, I find the suggestion that Robinson’s apparent journey towards left-wing extremism was spurred on by his time at school misguided.

    For one, Robinson had only attended a single semester of college. Afterwards, he dropped out and attended trade school with the goal of becoming an electrician. It’s hard to imagine Robinson as being set on his path by higher education, only to abandon it so swiftly and commit himself to a less ideological and far more prosaic vocational course.

    Additionally, violent, militant leftists are rarely created from scratch in America’s higher educational institutions. The solitary focus on college and university takes some much warranted heat off of K-12 education, itself perfectly capable of churning out dogmatic leftists, as anybody involved in their high school’s debate club could surely tell you. Mostly, the conservative stock character of the college liberal is not someone who experienced an epiphany upon going away to school, but is instead one who, after a decade and a half of essentially leftist moral schooling, finds an opportunity to express themselves ideologically in a less consequential environment. If Robinson’s radicalization could be attributed to education, it ought to be blamed on American primary and secondary schools, whose curricula regardless of geographic location are as woke as it gets.

    So surely, then, the shooter’s leftism was, in fact, an expression of anomie brought on by thousands of hours spent gaming and browsing the internet? Conservatives would do well not to fall into this trap either. It’s much to the advantage of leftists that conservatives, informed by their own parochial contempt for the youth, try to identify Robinson as a “school shooter” type, a wayward young man who needed his controllers and keyboards locked away for his own good.

    The freedom of Americans, particularly the young, to associate and network beyond the confines of their family and immediate community ought to be protected by conservatives – not just on principle, but because we owe so many of our victories to it. Modern American conservatism draws nearly its entire vocabulary and rhetorical arsenal from right-wing online spaces, old and new. In fact, the new and popular conservatism that has materialized around Trump traces a far, far larger component of its genealogy to these places than it does to, say, “postliberal” thinkers like Oren Cass.

    The characters pushing the nihilistic school shooter narrative are, by and large, those left behind by the right’s current dynamism, seeking to rein it back in, forcing it into a form they’re more comfortable operating within. This cannot be allowed to happen. The problem of left-wing bias in the media, in education at all levels, and even in most hobbyist circles remains. The right has an unofficial mastery over the internet, and it’s the only channel with this distinction. Indeed, many of the brightest pro-Trump and pro-American minds I’ve known are people who, being intelligent and critical enough to identify the leftism in everything young people interface with, made their home online in order to network with likeminded figures. To surrender this would be a critical error.

    What motivated Robinson was an overwhelmingly woke, anti-white, and anti-male social climate in contemporary America. Robinson himself was either too small-minded or poorly constituted in spirit to dissent from this, and instead chose to embrace the ideology he’s been passively absorbing throughout his entire waking life, and – if the allegations against him are true – followed it to its natural conclusion. Education and an internet censored and tyrannized by leftists are contributors to this environment, among many others. However, sole blame is not attributable to either component, and right-wing voices looking to elevate their own cultural hobby horse to the status of an omni-cause should forbear.

    The track the administration is taking, on the other hand, seems to recognize the stakes. Stephen Miller, as usual, appears to understand how broad the scope of any measures taken to crush radical leftism will have to be. Bringing up RICO charges against George Soros and other financiers and designating antifa a terrorist organization are great starts. Increased efforts to de-wokify education at all levels are welcome. Effective online measures – forcing Google and other tech companies to stop silencing right-wingers – would be too. But to blame this tragedy on only one ill is to misunderstand the nature of the problem. The ideology that drove the alleged killer Robinson is embedded in virtually every real-life institution that he would have interacted with; any solution must proceed from this core premise. A holistic approach to ending radical leftism, then, is the only way we can honor Kirk’s legacy, and make sure nothing like this is permitted to happen ever again.

  • Is Antifa a terrorist organization?

    Is Antifa a terrorist organization?

    One side of the political aisle can only accuse the other of “fascism” so many times before a young, impressionable person subsumed within a social-media echo chamber takes matters into his own hands. This seems to be exactly what transpired in the case of Tyler Robinson: bullet shell casings found at the scene of Charlie Kirk’s assassination were reportedly etched with the words “Hey fascist! Catch!” Robinson seems to have been influenced by Antifa or Antifa-adjacent ideology. In response to the killing, Congress and commentators have renewed calls to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. But this would have little effect.

    Antifa is a collaboration of autonomous cells with the ostensible goal of opposing fascism and racism. Described by former FBI Director Christopher Wray as “more of an ideology than an organization,” the group and its nodes operate secretly and communicate via dark-web platforms. And while Antifa has adherents around the world, it appears to be based primarily in the US. It is this lack of formal structure and domestic status that makes dealing with Antifa such a challenge.

    Formal designation as a terrorist organization is intended for foreign actors, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS. It provides for jurisdiction over entities located outside the US, allowing for freezing their assets and barring members from entering the country. It also provides intelligence agencies the go-ahead to conduct surveillance of such groups overseas, without the constitutional guardrails that protect the privacy rights of American citizens.

    As a domestic movement, Antifa cells and individuals are already subject to federal and state laws criminalizing intimidation, violence and other forms of terrorist activities. Existing federal law also prohibits providing material support such as money and other resources to entities that engage in terrorism. Applying a formal terrorist label to Antifa may grab headlines but provides no new tools for confronting the problem.

    There is the question whether designation would enable the surveillance of domestic actors without obtaining a traditional search warrant. In theory, this could help authorities more quickly monitor Antifa members with fewer judicial impediments. But one can easily see how such power could be abused to spy on American citizens. This would strip Americans the due process guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Once this guardrail goes, it’s hard to see it ever being erected again.

    This is not to say that nothing more can be done. The FBI and other law-enforcement groups should put more energy and resources into locating and infiltrating Antifa cells. They should be looking for money trails moving to these groups to fund violent attacks. They should be online to find Antifa working groups on the dark web. The real work will be in funding and staffing resources, making sure federal and state law enforcement and intelligence assets are working together, and bringing aggressive prosecutions against individuals who identify with the movement.

    From a political perspective, the push must be to quarantine Antifa-affiliated groups from social-media platforms. And young Americans must be taught to recognize the toxic nature of the group’s propaganda. While vigorous law enforcement will be essential in the short-term, the war against Antifa is a long one much more about shining a spotlight on this vile and destructive ideology.

    In the aftermath of a national tragedy, there is always an impulse by our leaders to show they are doing something to address the issue. But designating Antifa a terrorist organization is nothing more than low-hanging fruit. The real work lies in toning down the rhetoric and getting young people off the internet.

  • When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?

    When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?

    Will Saudi Arabia ever be held to account for the 9/11 terror attacks? For decades, the Kingdom has successfully parried lawsuits in the United States accusing it of providing logistical and financial support to a network of Islamic extremists who launched a global terror campaign, culminating in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

    Those attacks occurred 24 years ago and since then survivors and victims of the 9/11 hijackings have had to counter not only vigorous Saudi denials mounted by their well-funded American legal team but also repeated attempts by the US government to thwart the lawsuits.

    But there are signs the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. On August 28, US District Judge George B. Daniels, in a little noticed ruling in Manhattan, denied a motion by the Kingdom to dismiss the case, opening the way for a trial. In his decision, Daniels found that a small cadre of Saudi government employees tied to the consulate in Los Angeles had formed a support network for two of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 and 2001 and probably had advance knowledge of the plot. In his opinion, Daniels raised the prospect of wider involvement by Saudi officials. Daniels ruling is the first judicial finding in the United States that the government of Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the 9/11 attacks.

    A key piece of evidence in the case, what plaintiffs lawyers call an al-Qaeda surveillance video of the US Capitol, came from the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service. The Met obtained the video during a raid of the Birmingham home of a suspected Saudi intelligence operative, Omar al-Bayoumi, two weeks after 9/11. 

    Daniels said the evidence suggests Bayoumi, employed ostensibly as an accountant for a Saudi aviation firm, and Fahad al-Thumairy, a radical cleric based in the Los Angeles consulate, assisted two of the hijackers in advance of the attacks in their official capacity as Saudi government employees. “Thumairy and Bayoumi were not just acting as an imam and accountant,” Daniels declared. “Their employment with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia likely had some connection with assisting the hijackers.”

    Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists, 15 of them Saudi nationals, hijacked four commercial airliners in the United States the morning of September 11, 2001, and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. A fourth plane, which the terrorists apparently intended to use to attack the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers revolted and rushed the cockpit.

    In all, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, including 657 at the investment firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, who were killed when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Cantor’s former CEO, Howard Lutnick, now US Commerce Secretary, is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the Kingdom.

    Plaintiffs lawyers have been collecting evidence of Saudi involvement almost from the day of the attacks – the first lawsuit against the Kingdom was filed on September 10, 2003 – and those facts have long suggested that the Saudis provided logistical and financial support to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The plaintiffs’ theory rests in part on uncontroverted evidence that the Saudi royal family and Saudi government officials, beginning in the mid-1980s funded Islamist charities that in turn supplied weapons and logistical support to mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.

    That movement later spread to the vicious Balkans war of the 1990s, which pitted indigenous Muslims and their al-Qaeda allies against local Serbs and Croats. From there, al-Qaeda quickly leapfrogged to attack other western targets including two US embassies in East Africa and the US Navy destroyer, USS Cole, culminating in the 9/11 attacks.

    Regional offices of the charities employed al-Qaeda members in senior positions and these charities supplied money, travel documents, arms, safe houses and other assistance to al-Qaeda cells, the plaintiffs allege. Absent the assistance of Saudi government funded charities, a half dozen of which were designated as terrorism supporters by the US Treasury Department, al-Qaeda and bin Laden never could have mounted the logistically complex 9/11 operation.

    So alarmed were US government officials by the role of the Saudi charities in funding international terror that then-vice president Al Gore met privately in 1999 with then crown prince Abdullah in the White House to ask for assistance in tracking down terror groups based in the Kingdom. Abdullah agreed to put senior US intelligence officials with their Saudi counterparts, but US officials said nothing came of it.

    “We went to the Saudis as a government, showed them what we had, asked them for more information, warned them of what might take place and ultimately nothing happened,” said Jonathan Winer, then deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement. 

    Central to the lawsuits against the Kingdom are reports that emerged within days of the attacks that Bayoumi and Thumairy, the Saudi consular official, assisted Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first 9/11 hijackers to arrive in the United States, getting settled in southern California in January of 2000.

    Bayoumi’s ostensible employment as an accountant was with a Los Angeles based Saudi aviation company named Dallah Avco, in a government funded position. While Bayoumi drew a salary, fellow employees told investigators he only rarely showed up for work. He did, though, have multiple contacts with the hijackers, along with Thumairy, helping them find an apartment and co-signing a lease for a rental in San Diego, and arranging for them to take flying lessons and learn English. 

    When interviewed by the FBI shortly after 9/11, Bayoumi said he had met the hijackers by chance in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles on February 1, 2000, near the Saudi consulate, where he had traveled to clear up a visa problem. He claimed to have taken the initiative to introduce himself to the hijackers when he heard them speaking an Arab dialect common in the Persian Gulf and felt it was his duty as a fellow Muslim to help them get settled.

    This claim was dismissed early on by FBI investigators who concluded that Bayoumi’s luncheon meeting with the hijackers had been planned and that he likely was a Saudi intelligence operative with links to al-Qaeda. “(Bayoumi) acted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion,” an FBI agent told congressional investigators. “And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if provided some kind of financing or payment of some sort, then I would say there might be a clear connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL (Osama bin Laden).”

    Bayoumi moved to England before 9/11, but soon after the attacks FBI agents who had picked up his trail in southern California, alerted British authorities of his potential role and the Met Police searched his Birmingham home. Among the items taken from the house was a video recording Bayoumi made of the US Capitol building in 1999 along with the Washington Monument and other landmarks. Also confiscated was a drawing of an airplane with a calculation that experts for both the FBI and plaintiffs lawyers later concluded was a mathematical formula showing the rate of descent necessary for an airplane to collide with a target on the ground.

    While he made the video, Bayoumi was accompanied by two Saudi embassy officials from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, a branch of the Saudi government staffed at the time by radical clerics whose role was to propagate a militant form of Wahhabi Islam that vilified the west. In the video, Bayoumi takes pains to note the Capitol’s main entrances and points out locations of the capitol’s security staff.

    Former acting CIA director Michael Morrel, and other former US intelligence officials have described the video as a casing film made in preparation for a terrorist attack. “No doubt in my mind that al-Qaeda tasked him to do this casing video,” Morrel said in an interview with CBS news.

    One of the more salient aspects of the aftermath of 9/11 is the degree to which the United States government has sought to conceal what it knows about the origins of the plot, a tactic that has frustrated efforts by the plaintiffs lawyers to get at the truth while greatly benefiting the Saudis. The stonewalling began with the administration of President George W. Bush, which insisted on classifying and keeping from public view portions of the first congressional investigation, the so-called Joint Inquiry, raising questions about Bayoumi and the potential role of the Saudi government.

    The late Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the investigation, then went so far as to accuse Bush of protecting the Kingdom because of Bush family ties to the oil industry and Saudi royals. 

    The equivocations and evasions continued through each succeeding administration. The FBI, for example, has been in possession of the Bayoumi video of the Capitol building since 2001, but failed to turn it over to not only plaintiffs lawyers but also the 9/11 commission. The plaintiffs only were able to access the video when the Met Police agreed to give it to them in 2022.

    Some of the foot dragging at times has resembled theater of the absurd. Early in the case, when plaintiffs lawyers requested the Justice Department make public a copy of the Interpol bin Laden arrest warrant, the answer they got back was the warrant was protected by privacy rules and that department couldn’t release it without bin Laden’s permission.

    At other points, the government obstruction was of far greater import. In 2009, then US Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now a US Supreme Court Justice, filed an amicus brief in the litigation asking the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of a lower court decision dismissing the case against the Kingdom. Kagan argued there was no persuasive evidence of Saudi government involvement, even as the FBI continued to pursue evidence Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence operative with possible links to al-Qaeda. The Supreme Court, heeding Kagan’s request, declined to hear the matter.

    Later, in 2016, the Obama administration lobbied heavily against legislation intended to aid the 9/11 victims by expanding the basis for suing foreign governments that foment terrorism. Administration officials warned the Saudis would withdraw upwards of $750 billion in assets from US financial institutions if the bill became law. Obama vetoed the measure after both the House and Senate passed it overwhelmingly. Congress overturned the veto and the bill became law.

    That measure, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, clarifies the US State Department need not designate a foreign government a terrorism supporter as a condition for being sued in US courts, a requirement that had hampered the 9/11 lawsuits. It also makes clear that not all of the tortious conduct must to take place in the United States.

    The dire scenarios depicted by the Obama administration never came to pass, while the measure gave new life to the plaintiffs’ litigation and set the stage for Daniels’ groundbreaking decision on August 28. 

    Now that the lawsuits seem to be headed for trial, 9/11 victims and their families, along with the nation as a whole, may finally get answers to questions about Saudi Arabia’s involvement that have been swirling around the case since the beginning.

  • Mossad’s secret allies in Operation Wrath of God

    Mossad’s secret allies in Operation Wrath of God

    More than half a century ago Palestinian terrorists stormed the 1972 Munich Olympics, murdering two of the Israeli team and taking another nine hostage. The West German authorities, ill-equipped to deal with such incidents, agreed to fly the terrorists and their hostages to Egypt. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, offered to mount a rescue operation. The Germans launched their own, resulting in the deaths of a police officer, four of the seven terrorists and all the hostages.   

    One consequence was the Israeli government’s Operation Wrath of God, a program to assassinate any leaders or planners associated with the massacre. Ten missions were organized in Europe, each signed off by the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir on condition that no innocent bystanders were killed.

    There have been several books about the operation and a 2005 film by Steven Spielberg. Aviva Guttmann’s account does not merely rehearse the stories, though each operation is outlined. Rather, she shows how the security services of European nations cooperated in identifying, monitoring and investigating international terrorists in general and how this aided Mossad in its pursuit of vengeance. 

    Cooperation was via the Club de Berne, an intelligence exchange between eight countries founded in 1969 in response to the growth of international terrorism. Soon expanded to include other countries, among them Israel, it handled communications via encrypted telegrams (which Guttmann calls cables) using the code word Kilowatt. Guttmann found these communications in publicly available Swiss archives. She analyzes each assassination, showing how the exchange of Kilowatt information helped Mossad identify and locate their targets, how the various security services learned about terrorist tactics, such as the recruitment or duping of young European women, and how hitherto unknown plots to murder or hijack were prevented.

    The first assassination was only a month after Munich. Wael Zwaiter, a young Palestinian translator in Rome, returned to his flat to find two men on the stairway leading to his apartment. They shot him 11 times, a bullet for each Munich victim. Journalistic opinion at the time and since concluded that Mossad got the wrong man – a bit-part player at best. But the Kilowatt telegrams show that he had an important logistical role.

    One operation that Mossad very definitely got wrong was in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer in 1973 when they shot an innocent Moroccan waiter alongside his seven-months pregnant wife. Not only that, but the assassins were caught. Contributing factors to this debacle were an inexperienced, hurriedly assembled team and insufficient research – the poor man was confused with a real terrorist solely on photographic resemblance. Mossad teams generally comprised about 15 people – two to do the killing, two to guard them, two to organize cover and facilities, six to eight to research the target’s routines and movements and two to communicate both within the team and back to Israel.

    Guttmann’s principal concern – oft-repeated – is that European security services “played a vital role in the organization and execution of Operation Wrath of God.” The extent to which they did so knowingly is not always clear, although they could not have failed to know after Lillehammer. There is no doubt, though, that the information they exchanged with Israel (including their own investigations into Mossad killings) facilitated assassinations within their own borders. “One would simply not expect Europeans to help kill Palestinians… Governments… failed in their duty to keep safe all citizens,” Guttmann notes. Her disapproval is evident throughout, though not explicitly stated or argued. This is a pity because the opposite case – whether it can be justifiable to murder those seeking to murder you – is nowadays too prevalent to be dismissed without argument. We witness its effects daily on our screens.

    She concedes, however, that all participants benefitted from the exchange and that Israel was itself a significant contributor.  But in claiming that the various agencies “did not need to respect the same normative considerations as official foreign policy lines” she implies that they acted independently or against their own governments’ policies. On this side of the Channel at least, actions by the intelligence agencies, including exchanges with liaison services, require government approval. MI5 does not simply do what it likes. It is not the case that relying on “foreign intelligence shows… weakness and dependency,” as Guttmann says of Mossad.  Nor are attributing information to “friendly services within the region,” or claiming a source has “direct access,” forms of boasting; they and other formulae are necessary and conventional guides to assessing reports.   

    She is on firmer ground in questioning the effectiveness of targeted killings, as assassinations are now often called. In the short term they can be highly disruptive and satisfy an understandable thirst for revenge; but in the longer term leaders may be succeeded by those with renewed determination and security. Half a century on, the causes that prompted Wrath of God are with us still.

  • Will Trump take a stand against the Muslim Brotherhood?

    Will Trump take a stand against the Muslim Brotherhood?

    Senator Ted Cruz isn’t giving up. Cruz, who believes that the Muslim Brotherhood serves as the “key foundation stone for radical Sunni terrorism,” has just reintroduced – together with five Republican senators and bipartisan support in the House of Representatives – the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act, which he first proposed in 2015. Cruz is no stranger to controversy when it comes to Islam: in March 2016, following a terrorist attack in Brussels, he said that it was imperative to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods” in America before they became radicalized.

    Now he is reupping his call to focus on the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt in 1928, it is a dangerously militant Islamic organization with affiliates around the globe. While the US State Department has designated some branches of the Brotherhood as terrorist organizations, it has not targeted the main group. Has the moment arrived to take a stand?

    A growing chorus of voices is arguing that it has. According to Andrew McCarthy in National Review, “Ted Cruz understands the threat and is distinguishing himself by charting a very different policy direction. It will serve him well. And it would serve the country well.” Writing in the Middle East Forum, Jim Hanson agreed: “The Muslim Brotherhood represents a danger to the civilized world and designating it a Foreign Terrorist Organization will help curb its influence. An indication that this is a correct move can be seen in the actions of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan. These countries all know the Brotherhood well; each has designated the Brotherhood as a terror group.” 

    These apprehensions about the Muslim Brotherhood are not the sole province of American conservatives. As early as 1948, King Farouk of Egypt banned the group. Today, alarm about the Brotherhood exists in France, where President Emanuel Macron is seeking to address the threat of Islamic radicalism. In May, a state-commissioned report on the Muslim Brotherhood was leaked, and its conclusions caused a furor. It stated that “political Islam” posed a mounting danger to the democratic values of the French republic. “The reality of this threat,” the report declared, “even if it is long-term and does not involve violent action, highlights the risk of damage to the fabric of society and republican institutions.”

    Critics of Cruz’s motion contend that it will boomerang, stirring up more hostility toward America in the Islamic world and stoking broader fears about Islam. Dov Zakheim, the former undersecretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, observes that the claim that singling out the Brotherhood would promote Islamophobia is misplaced – the Brotherhood is already banned by a welter of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

    The pressure is building in Congress. In early June, Congresswoman Nancy Mace introduced the Muslim Brotherhood Is A Terrorist Organization Act. “The Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t just support terrorism, it inspires it,” said Mace. “President Trump was right when he said the Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to global security, and it’s long past time we call them what they are: terrorists.”

    Will Trump act to try and counter a pernicious ideology that has brought destruction to so many lives? The President has a history of taking bold action in the Middle East, from the assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani to bombing Iranian nuclear facilities to meeting with interim Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa. He has a variety of choices, from issuing an executive order banning the Brotherhood to imposing Treasury sanctions. With bipartisan backing in Congress, it seems more likely than ever that Trump will seek to target the Muslim Brotherhood for destruction.