Dead End to Terror and Promises to Keep

Mahler, Pierce, and the Third Position

In 1980 Horst Mahler, the renegade Marxist-lawyer-turned-bank-robber, was released from prison. The legal counsel of Gerhard Schroeder, who would become the chancellor of Germany, aided Mahler's release. Since then Mahler has turned from leftist guerilla to a conservative. He joined the neo-fascist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and has taken on a philosophy that joins the extremes of left and right-wing politics, a synthesis of anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-Jew under the banner of anti-capitalism, all of which he expounds in publications and his own Web site. The coalition of extreme right and left wings of politics with a common hatred of capitalism is as old as the Bolshevism of the 1920s and, as author Walter Laqueur writes in his book No End to War, reappeared in the 1930s with "the Nazi movement (Otto Strasser), and then taken up by the French right and on a more primitive ideological level by American neo-Nazis such as the Aryan Nations Congress . . . calling for the support of the white working class against monopoly capitalism and the corporations."[i] This bizarre amalgamation of philosophies has been called the "third position," where the right-wing hatred for "Jewish capitalism" is melded with the left-wing hatred for "Jewish imperialism." A common hatred is then fanned with the allies of Muslim violence into a "formidable political force," a wave of the future as Laqueur calls it.

In 1988 Gerhard Schroeder helped Mahler regain his license to practice law. Mahler made a habit of speaking at NPD conferences where he used Nazi clichés and reiterated huge sections of Hitler's speeches. "That Germany started two world wars is a discredited lie. Germans have been robbed of their self-confidence by 'the Jewish spirit.'" Mahler declared the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. long overdue strikes against "Judeo-American barbarism," and foretells "the end of the American Century, the end of Global Capitalism, and thus the end of the secular Yahweh cult of Mammonism." Jews and Americans had no right to a state of their own claimed Mahler. There is no such thing as American people -- "only a crude, immoral, violent mass, which had produced nothing but corruption, pseudo-democracy" and blood imperialism. The ultimate strangeness of the "third position" can be seen with the meeting of Mahler and William Pierce at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, a handbook that has inspired right-wing terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, died in July of 2002 but not before meeting with Mahler in Europe.[ii] Pierce founded the American Nazi Party in 1965.[iii]

The Daughters of Ulrike Meinhof and Fusako Shigenobu

In January 2001, Stern magazine published photos showing Germany's Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer in the middle of a violent street demonstration in Frankfurt in April 1973. Fischer was shown confronting a police officer who seemed to be the victim of group violence. Along with the damning photos came the accusation that Fischer was a RAF sympathizer, attended a 1969 meeting with the PLO, and harbored RAF members in his house. RAF member Margrit Schiller wrote in 1999 that she had indeed stayed in a "Revolutionary Struggle" house in the early 1970s with Fischer in attendance.[iv] The house was also linked to visits from lightweight American revolutionaries Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and international terrorist Carlos the Jackal,[v] who claimed he stored arms in the house. Fischer was friends with Communist and campus-agitator Danny "The Red" Cohn-Bendit and Jans Joachim Klein, a member of the Revolutionary Cells, a group linked to aiding Black September in the attack on the Munich Olympics.

Who was responsible for starting the political firestorm that surrounded one of Germany's highest-ranking officials? The thirty-eight-year old Bettina Rohl, one of Ulrike Meinhof's twin daughters, delivered the photos that caused German citizens to question Fischers' credibility to Stern. The Rohl twins had a traumatic childhood. They were abandoned by their mother when she flew to Beirut, and they were to be smuggled from Italy into the Palestinian terror camp where Ulrike was training until their father, a leftist himself, kidnapped them and returned them to Germany. They visited their mother at Stammheim prison, and eventually learned about her suicide. Considering the twins were victims of violence of the RAF and other leftist terrorists, it is understandable to conclude they might harbor a grudge against their mother's associates or sympathizers. How could Bettina strike back? It appears she decided to attack the leftists who caused her so much misery in the form of the mighty Fischer. Possibly in Bettina's mind she was attacking a man, as writer Paul Berman put it, who "had participated in the radical cause and gotten away scot-free; someone who managed to profit from every horrible thing that had taken place."

Fischer was a political activist in the sixties and seventies. He was involved in the Frankfurt riot that demonstrated against what was thought to be the murder of Ulrike Meinhof in 1976. At that demonstration a molotov cocktail severely burned a police officer, nearly killing him. Fischer and several other street demonstrators were jailed for two days as the incident was investigated. With the publication of the Stern photos, Bettina Rohl revived the accusation that Fischer bore responsibility in the police officer's injuries. As Bettina struck back at the misery the leftists caused her, it is no small irony that she, like her mother, attacked a German government official who at one time was demonstrating against a German government that may have had a hand in killing the one person both Fischer and Bettina admired: Ulrike Meinhof.[vi] Bettina's twin sister Regine, a psychiatrist, announced in 2002 that she was suing two scientists that claimed Ulrike's bizarre behavior was due to brain damage caused by the 1962 surgery on a brain tumor. Regine was reported as saying she was suing the scientists for "disturbing the peace of the dead."[vii]

Like Ensslin and Meinhof, Fusako Shigenobu had a child, Mei. Mei Shigenobu's father was a Palestinian guerilla and though Mei would not say for sure during interviews in the year 2001, it seems he was killed sometime during her childhood. She was born in Lebanon in 1973 and was visited by her mother for three months of the year. Her mother spent the rest of her time devoted to terrorist activities. Mei told reporters that her childhood was a "very nice experience" though she went hungry at times and feared the Israeli Mossad. She harbors no bitterness toward her mother and when she learned her mother was arrested in Japan she flew there to be close to her. Mei says that it is a false assumption that the Japanese Red Army was only devoted to violence. She claims they acted as nurses and helped in Palestinian refugee camps. In 2002 she rented a Tokyo apartment, taught English to make a living, and caused a sensation in Japan when she made a speech at a Fujisawa elementary school on "the circumstances Palestinian children of similar age face."[viii]

The Colonel, The Red Queen, and Carlos the Jackal

Fusako Shigenobu and Colonel Qaddafi had several meetings that concluded in the 1988 bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Japanese Red Army provided the explosives for the Pan Am 103 bombing, which was carried out by the PFLP and the aid of Libya's Jumahiriya Security Organization (Libyan Intelligence Service, JSO). The bombing brought favor to the Libyans from the pleased Iranians who provided Libya with access to chemical and biological weapons. The Japanese Red Army began to fill its organization's coffers by hiring itself out as terror arms for other organizations.

The Japanese Red Army linked with Carlos the Jackal and staged numerous anti-American attacks throughout Europe during the 1980's.[ix] Carlos the Jackal is best known for kidnapping eleven OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975 with the aid of several West German terrorists.[x] Saddam Hussein and Wadi Haddad first conceived the operation. One of the objectives of the operation was to have all of the OPEC ministers make a public statement that would reject any negotiations with Israel on Palestinian issues. Hussein wanted Saudi Arabian Sheik Yamani and Iranian Dr. Amourzegar to be shot after the hijacked plane was delivered to Aden. Hussein was angry that Yamani blocked efforts to raise oil prices and Amourzegar, as an Iranian, was an enemy of Hussein. Movement 2 June member Gabi Krocher-Tiedemann killed an Iraqi security guard and an Austrian policeman during the operation and Carlos killed a Libyan civil servant. Carlos flew the oil ministers to Algiers, failed to kill Yamani and Amourzegar, and walked away free with millions of dollars of ransom money that was allegedly split between Haddad and Carlos.

Along with the strange connection between Libya's terror network and the Japanese Red Army, Qaddafi established a link with Irish terror. Qaddafi's 1969 coup ended Italian colonial rule that had lasted since 1911. As late as 1988 it was believed that Qaddafi used the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) [xi] of Spain along with the Red Army Faction to carry out numerous bombings against Americans in Spain. From 1985-87 Qadaffi's Libya smuggled tons of sophisticated weaponry to Ireland for the IRA. On October 13 and 15, 1987 Qaddafi shipped 150 tons of weapons to the IRA. French customs officials intercepted them. The booty included 1,000 Romanian-made AK-47s, 50 SAM-7 missiles, and two tons of the plastic explosive Semtex. Qaddafi and the IRA shared a hatred for Britain especially Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990). Thatcher had allowed American bombers to launch an attack from British airfields in an attempt to kill Qaddafi that resulted instead in killing Qaddafi's adopted daughter.

Ethnic separatists, similar to the old Black Hand of Serbia are replacing the anarchists and left-wing terrorist groups of the later part of the century, like the red armies. Ethnic terrorism has offered a longer-lasting and more powerful base of power than ideological groups because the former draw on a larger reservoir of public support. The Palestinian groups, as well as Kurdish[xii] extremists in Turkey and Iraq, Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka,[xiii] and the ETA of Spain are examples of terrorist wings that work in two camps: political and military. The political wing controls social activities, education, and business, and the military wing employs violence against enemies with the ubiquitous use of assassination, bombings, and hijackings.[xiv] The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, established in 1972, have used suicide bombings more effectively than any terror group in history. In their pursuit to establish a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka, separate from the Buddhist Sinhalese majority, suicide bombings have been used to kill a Sri Lankan president and an Indian prime minister. The Tigers have as many as 100,000 deaths to their credit.[xv] "Of all the suicide-capable terrorist groups we have studied, they are the most ruthless, the most disciplined," claimed Rohan Gunaratna of the Center for the Study of Terrorist and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The Tamil Tigers are responsible for half the suicide attacks in the world and an inspiration and model for groups like the Al Aqsa suicide bombers of the Middle East. Gunaratna noted that the attack on the destroyer USS Cole by Al Qaeda in 2000 was similar to a Tiger attack on a Sri Lankan naval ship in 1991. A leader of the aquatic suicide attacks by the Tigers boasted in a BBC interview that the USS Cole attack had been copied from the Tigers.[xvi]

The Dead End

The Red Army Faction left a legacy of horror, stupidity, and cruelty that has been fodder for a remarkable amount of film, music, and fiction. Novels (Rosenfest, SpielEnde, Hoffman, A Disturbance in Paris), [xvii] photo paintings (Gerhard Richter series of paintings entitled "18 Oktober 1977"), and films and television dramas (Black Box BRD, Stammheim, Deutschland im Herbst, and Die stille nach dem schuss - The Legends of Rita, Death Game --Todesspiel, Baader) spotlight activities and characters of the RAF, especially the first generation.[xix] In 1990, a dance production called "Ulrike Meinhof," funded by the German government, was received by the public and critics with more praise for the production than mockery.[xx] The rock group Baader Meinhof produced an album of the same name that featured songs like "Meet Me At The Airport," "There's Gonna Be An Accident," and "Mogadishu." The 2001 premier issue of the German magazine Tussi-Deluxe featured a fashion layout with a RAF motif, a handsomely dressed terrorist was pictured lying in a pool of blood modeling the kind of slippers Andreas Baader wore. This photo was only one among several equally bizarre and heinous scenes where models presented the latest fashion revolving around what journalists have quaintly labeled "terrorist chic." [xxi]

On April 20, 1998 Reuters news agency received a communiqué from the RAF that announced the organization's end. Without any acknowledgement or expression of regret over the 30 people who had died at the hands of their "urban guerilla" organization, the last generation of the RAF simply said, "We are stuck in a dead end."[xxii]

Throughout the twentieth century the international community often ignored terrorist groups. Some, like the Baader-Meinhof/RAF, rose to power to strike against established government order. Other groups, like Black September of the Middle East, the ETA of Spain, and the Symbionese Liberation Army of the United States, made their bloody marks against their enemies. [xxiii] Libya's Qaddafi continued to aid terror groups like The Moro Liberation Front (Muslim separatists based in the Philippines) and Abu Nidal's terror network (Fatah Revolutionary Council - FRC) established in Baghdad and initially an instrument of Iraqi policy.[xxiv] In 1984 French police discovered a Parisian Red Army Faction safehouse, which housed a laboratory containing bottles of deadly botulism toxin, clostridium botulinum, which made the group possibly the first modern terrorist group to consider bio warfare.[xxv] In 1994, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo would use botulinum and Sarin gas in an attack on Japanese people in the cities of Matsumoto and Tokyo. [xxvi] The success of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Italian Red Brigades would eventually inspire the formation of Revolutionary Organization 17 November (RO-17N or 17N), a violent group responsible for the assassination of a CIA station chief in Athens in 1975 and 100 other violent attacks in the name of Greek nationalism in the last 25 years of the twentieth century.[xxvii]

Baader-Meinhof/RAF in its prime has been described as a distinctive cultural statement engaged in a "style war disguised as 'international Marxism' " unknowingly creating a "German version of pop" and a "particular literary avant garde." Their politics was anti-establishment, anti-democracy, anti-status quo, and their exploits were often detailed in tabloid German press that painted them as chic outlaws in their BMW (occasionally called Baader-Meinhof-Wagen) get-away cars engaged in a sick, violent street theater of break-outs, shootings, bombings, and bank robberies.[xxviii] This "street theater" has been called a "narcissistic staging rather than a protest against injustice, against the oppressed, which is what they claimed."[xxix] As essayist Thomas Elsaesser wrote, their sudden appearance in 1972 as a "Bonnie-and-Clyde gang in the stodgy West of petit bourgeois Germany lent the events a surreal improbability." The hashish-smoking, department-store bombers that triggered the many years of deadly RAF violence are noticeably related to the unlikely murderous syncophants of Hassan ibn Sabah's eleventh century assassins -- the paradise-seeking, hashish lovers who were lethal human tools of Islamic justice and politics. Numerous radicals of the 1960's embraced the euphoria created by dope and any action - violent or peaceful - taken against state governments, a trend that continues with the heavy-beated, anti-law, anti-establishment "gangsta" rap.[xxx] With the advent of the Internet, terrorist messages - messages that would otherwise find no venue in mainsteam media - can be broadcast to worldwide audiences. An English-language rap song urging war against "Crusaders and apostate Arab rulers" and praising the violence of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States was broadcast via the Internet in 2004.[xxxi]

In 1996 Osama bin Laden encouraged Muslims worldwide to kill U.S. soldiers. In May 1998, bin Ladin brazenly outlined his objectives in a press conference by announcing a fatwa (religious decree) and encouraged all Muslims to kill all Americans, whether they be soldiers or civilians, and expanded his jihad to all Christians who conquered Muslim lands. He announced to the world that he had formed a new sacred terror group, in concert with previously competing Egyptian terrorist leaders, called the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders. In a declaration in February 1998 in Pakistan, bin Laden announced that many key terrorist groups had joined an alliance between Al Qaeda[xxxii] and the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders, which included the Egyptian Islamic Jihad,[xxxiii] the Egyptian al-Gama'at al-Islaimiyya,[xxxiv] and the Harakat ul-Ansar.[xxxv] At the end of the statement bin Laden clearly threatened the United States by saying Americans "were very easy targets." He also added "you will see the results of this in a very short time."[xxxvi]

This concludes the four-part series: Part 1, Alliances of Terrorism; Part 2, Terrorist Training and Left Wing Alliances; Part 3, Japanese Red Army and Black September.

End notes

[i] Laqueur, Walter, No End to War -- Terrorism in the 21^st Century, Continuum, New York, 2003, p. 220.

[ii] Ibid. , p.153.

[iii] William Pierce sold 350,000 copies of the Turner Diaries and 500,000 copies of his other book The Hunter by the end of the century.

[iv] Schiller, Margrit. "Es war ein harter Kampf um meine Erinnerung": ein Lebenbericht aus der RAF, Konkret, Hamburg, 1999.

[v] The Venezuelan-born terrorist, born Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, was the son of a middle-class real estate agent (not a wealthy lawyer as is often reported) with communist sympathies. Sanchez' father sent Ilyich (named after Lenin) to Moscow for an education at Lamumba University, also known as the "University of Terrorism" since its staff consisted of 90% KGB agents. Captured in the Sudan in August 1995, he was convicted of murder and kidnapping and sentenced to life December 24, 1997 in France.

[vi] Berman, Paul, "The Passion of Joschka Fischer -- From the radicalism of the '60s to the interventionism of the '90s," The New Republic, August 27, 2001, p. 36.

[vii] Holden, Constance. "Random Samples," Science, Novermber 22, 2002.

[viii] "Japanese Group Protests Israeli Objection to Lecture by Militant's Daughter," Kyodo News Service, March 31, 2002.

[ix] A phone call from a person claiming that the Japanese Red Army was responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States was made to Al Jazeera satellite network on the day of the attacks.

[x] Carlos the Jackal and the Japanese Red Army teamed up to engineer the 1975 Hague takeover of the French embassy and a deadly bombing of a discotheque in Paris. He worked for East Germany, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. During the flight to Algiers he handed out autographs. Patterns of Global Terrorism, Department of State Publications (United States), Office of the Secretary of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, 2000, category: Germany.

[xi] Basque ETA (Euzkadita Azkatasuma) is a radical Basque separatist organization that aims its violence against the Spanish government. ETA has had links to the Irish Republican Army, as well as Cuban and Libyan governments.

[xii] The most prominent of the Kurdish groups is the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) devoted through a Marxist-Leninist ideology to fight Turkish and Iraqi forces.

[xiii] Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) are a Sri Lankan separatist guerrilla organization founded in 1972. The Tigers seek an independent Tamil state from the hated Buddhist Sinhalese majority of the island.

[xiv] Laqueur, Walter. "Postmodern Terrorism," Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct.1996, pp. 24-36.

[xv] Townshend, Charles. Terrorism - A Very Short Introduction, Oxford/New York, 2002, p. 75.

[xvi] Waldman, Amy. "Tigers model for suicide bombings," The New York Times, January 14, 2003, p. 1.

[xvii] For a review of the "New German Fiction" that includes SpielEnde, Rosenfest, Hoffman see Reschke, Karin. "Guns 'n' Roses; German Fiction; New German Fiction," The Economist, (US), June 16, 2001, p. 5.

[xviii] Hobley, Annabel. "Red Army Fashion Is The Height of Terrorist Chic: The Baader-Meinhof gang has become a cult in Germany." The Financial Times, July 21, 2001, p. 3.

[xix] Copjec, Joan and Sorkin, Michael, editors. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, Verso, London 1999, p. 268. The film Baader is a 2002 release of a 72 Film Production, reviewed in Variety, March 18, 2002, v. 386.

[xx] "The Power to Shock," Time, July 9, 1990, p. 84.

[xxi] Hobley, Annabel. "Red Army Fashion Is The Height of Terrorist Chic: The Baader-Meinhof gang has become a cult in Germany." The Financial Times, July 21, 2001, p. 3.

[xxii] The letter addressed to the State Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe pronounced, "Today we are ending this project. The urban guerilla group in the form of the RAF is now history." Analysis of the document convinced officials at the federal Criminal Office in Wiesbaden that the document was authentic.

[xxiii] The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was a leftist group of terrorists based in California that flourished from 1973 to 1975. The founding members, following a modus operandi similar to the first generation of the Red Army Faction, were concerned in igniting a "people's rebellion" against the U.S. government and its capitalist system. Headed by a black, ex-con, Donald DeFreeze was able to assemble several followers after he escaped from prison. He attracted several young white women to his cause. The most celebrated act of this group was the February 4, 1974 kidnapping of Hearst heir, Patty Hearst.

[xxiv] Henderson, Harry. Global Terrorism, The Complete Reference Guide, Checkman Books, New York, 2001, pp. 36 and 40. Abu Nidal's real name was Sabri al Banna. Born of a wealthy Palestinian who lost his property in 1948 war, Nidal became a member of Sadaam Hussein's Ba'th party. He became linked with the JRA and the New People's Army of the Phillipines. Eventually kicked out of Iraq in 1983 by Hussein's foreign minister Tariq Aziz. Allegedly committed suicide in Baghdad in 2002 though there is a theory that Iraqi agents murdered him.

[xxv] Murphy, John. Sword of Islam, Prometheus, Amherst, New York, 2002, p. 38.

[xxvi] Simon, Lewis M. "Weapons of Mass Destruction - An ominous new chapter opens on the twentieth century's ugliest legacy." National Geographic, November, 2002, p. 31. Asahara claimed to have received enlightenment while alone in the Himalayan Mountains in 1986.

[xxvii] 17N named their group after a student occupation of an Athens school on November 17, 1973. The students' demands to end the present Greek military rule inspired more violent demonstrations in the following years. 17N has been called a group of fanatic nationalists that are anti-Greek establishment, anti-American, anti-Turkey, anti-NATO and any foreign military presence in Greece. Kassimeris, George. Europe's Last Red Terrorists - The Revolutionary Organization 17 November, New York University Press, New York, 2001.

[xxviii] Copjec, Joan and Sorkin, Michael, editors. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, Verso, London 1999, p. 290.

[xxix] Oliverio, Annamarie. The State of Terror, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1998, p. 104.

[xxx] Ibid. , pp. 186-87.

[xxxi] "Qaeda Sympathizers Turn to Rap to Battle 'Infidels'," February 9, 2004, Yahoo! News. Reported through Reuters, the song was entitled "Dirty Infidels."

[xxxii] Al Qaeda strikes against American targets that occurred before the September 11, 2001 attack: 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; 1996 bombing of U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia; 1998 bombing of U.S. Embassies of East Africa; 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Hassan, Nasra. "Al-Qaeda's Understudy," The Atlantic Monthly, June 2004, p. 44.

[xxxiii] Responsible for the 1983 bombing of Beirut U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Possibly a cover name for the Shi'ite organization Hezbollah (The Party of God).

[xxxiv] Egyptian based Islamic group established in the 1970s whose spiritual leader Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman was convicted on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Responsible for assassination attempt on Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in 1995 and the 1997 attack on tourists at Luxor, Egypt (aka IG or Islamic Group). Ramzi Yousef masterminded the 1993 bombing of the WTC where eight people were killed and scores injured. FBI agent John O'Neil, who would eventually be killed in the collapse of the South Tower of the Trade Center September 11, 2001, was instrumental in the capture of Yousef in Pakistan in 1995. Weiss, Murray. The Man Who Warned America, Harper Collins, New York, 2003, pp. 242-3.

[xxxv] Jeffrey, Grant R. War on Terror - Unfolding Bible Prophecy, Frontier Research Publications, Toronto, Ontario, 2002, pp. 27-30. Harakat ul-Ansar is also known as Haraka ul-Mujahedin, HUM, an Islamic militant group based in Pakistan that operates primarily in Kashmir. Its original focus was to fight Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Fazlur Rehman Khalil, one the HUM's leaders, was a signer of bin Laden's fatwa announced in February of 1998.

[xxxvi] Van Atta, Dale. "Carbombs and Cameras - The Need for Responsible Media Coverage of Terrorism," Harvard International Review, Fall, 1998, pp. 66-70.