Thursday, May 03, 2007

Terrorism in the Blogosphere

I've been interested in terrorism since university, but haven't really been tracking it for a couple of years. However, the last couple of days I've seen a few things around here and there that highlighted a few things about terrorism that have rekindled a bit of interest.

First of all, a review of Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. (Link: Politics in the Zeros_archi »Blog Archive » Buda’s Wagon. A Brief History of the Car Bomb)

Interestingly enough, the first car bomb was used in the US in 1920 by a guy of Mario Buda. The weapon so tightly associated with Muslims and the Middle East, especially Iraqi outdoor cafes, is actually an American invention. It develops and comes back with a vengeance.

The Zionist Stern Gang used car bombs in the late 1940’s to blow up
buildings in Palestine in an attempt to drive out the British and
terrorize Palestinians. The Irgun and Haganah, underground Zionist
groups labeled as terrorists by the British, quickly followed suit. The
use of car bombs by Zionists represented a major step forward both in
the lethality of the bombs and their use as political weapons.


However, Palestinians and Arabs soon learned the technology and
responded with the same, prompting one of the founders of Israel,
Ben-Gurion, to say after the bombing of a Haganah headquarters, “I
couldn’t forget that ‘our’ thugs and murderers had blazed this trail.”

and the reviewer restates the ultimate problem with terrorism in general and car bombs in particular:

Davis makes it clear that car bombs, while sometimes achieving
short-term gains, generally lead to increased violence from the the
other side (or sides) thus creating ever more mayhem and dead
innocents. Using Iraq as an example, some car bombs are aimed at US
forces, others are specifically used to create Sunni-Shia divisions.
Islamic hardliners use car bombs to reinforce sectarian divisions
because they do not want nationalism to occur because that would mean
they’d then have no power base. Doubtless many other players there
don’t want nationalism either.

The backlash is always a major problem with any terror strategy as has been well documented.

Which somehow led me to the issue of domestic terrorism. I'm not sure why the US seems to ignore all its problems with internal groups. Can you imagine all of these militias aren't actually listed? Christian terrorism is not something the US likes to acknowledge (Talk To Action | Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith).

Of course, the visceral hatred for abortion and Roe v Wade in the States means the society will accept anything that happens in the the name of Christ and the "Pro-Life" movement (SPLCenter.org: Anti-Abortion Movement/Feministe » The terrorism that dare not speak its name/“Pro-lifers” try to kill again in Austin at Pandagon)





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