How Wars Are Fought 285Republican Army’s long strug gles with British rule in Ireland, all three immortality
images came into play, as predominantly socialist, nationalist, and Catholic “terrorists”
sought to coerce Britain into abandoning Ireland’s Protestant minority, among other
things.
Like guerrilla warfare, terrorism has a long history. During Greek and Roman times,
individuals often carried out terrorist acts against their rulers. Interestingly, the con
temporary sense of the word “terror” dates from the French Revolution, in which Robes
pierre’s fragile government leveled extreme, and at times indiscriminate, vio lence against
the French people. But neither state perpetration nor sponsorship of terror should be
confused with terrorism as such, because, as observed earlier, a core ele ment of terrorism
is that it be perpetrated by nonstate actors. It is therefore difficult to say what to call the
kind of mass killing perpetrated by states such as the United States against Native
Americans, Hitler’s Third Reich against Jews, Stalin’s Soviet Union against Ukrainians,
and Pol Pot’s Cambodia against noncommunists. All terrorism may be barbarism, but
not all barbarism terrorism.
Although terrorism involves physical harm, the essence of terrorism is psychologi
cal, not physical. What ever the aims of the individual terrorist, killing is a by product
of terrorism as a strategy. The real aim of terrorism is to call attention to a cause, while
at the same time calling into question the legitimacy of a target government by high
lighting its inability to protect its citizens. For example, during the 1972 Summer
Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, a group of Palestinian Arab terrorists styling
themselves “Black September” took 11 Israeli athletes hostage in the Olympic Village.
Two of the hostages were murdered immediately. During a botched rescue attempt by
the surprised and ill prepared Germans, the remaining nine hostages were murdered
by their captors. Black September was a part of the Palestinian Liberation Or ga ni za
tion (PLO), a group founded by Yasser Arafat in 1964 to advance the cause of Pales
tinian Arab statehood by means of vio lence. But until Munich, few outside the Middle
East had ever heard of the PLO. After the games, the PLO (and “terrorists” more
broadly) became a widespread topic of conversation and state action. Another method
of gaining attention was hijacking commercial airplanes. In December 1973, Arab
terrorists killed 32 people in Rome’s airport during an attack on a U.S. aircraft.
Hostages were taken in support of the hijackers’ demand for the release of imprisoned
Palestinian Arabs. In 1976, a Middle Eastern organ ization hijacked a French plane
with mostly Israeli passengers and flew it to Uganda, where the hijackers threatened to
kill the hostages unless Arab prisoners in Israel were released. In the aftermath of
several such high profile cases, the international community responded by signing a
series of international agreements designed to tighten airport security, sanction states
that gave refuge to hijackers, and condemn state supported terrorism. The 1979 Inter
national Convention against the Taking of Hostages is a prominent example of such
an agreement.