The Lod Airport Massacre and beyond…
The psychology of the three gunmen is another matter. Here we enter a stoned world, that is, one of stoned thoughts and feelings. All three terrorists were Japanese. Naturally, the first question that arises is why three young Japanese revolutionaries, whatever their ideology or sympathies, undertook a mission that was manifestly a kamikaze one, as well as blindly murderous, on behalf of a group of Palestinian irredentists. Te answer, in a stoned world, of course, is why not?
—July 23, 2010:
A United States federal court has handed down a historic decision finding the government of North Korea and its intelligence service, the Cabinet General Intelligence Bureau, liable for an infamous terrorist attack perpetrated in Israel in 1972. The U.S. District Court in San Juan, Puerto Rico has ordered the defendants to pay $378,000,000 in damages to two families.
The case arises from a lawsuit brought by victims of the 1972 terror attack at the Lod Airport in Israel in which 26 people were killed and 80 injured. The plaintiffs alleged that the government of North Korea trained and financed the terrorists who carried out this heinous massacre.
Along with the Gary Osen Law group of New Jersey, attorney Robert Tolchin of New York and attorney Manuel San Juan of Puerto Rico, I represented the families in the case. —Read More:http://www.israellawcenter.org/page.asp?id=341&show=photo&pn=1053&ref=report
But the Israeli military investigators and judges who questioned the sole survivor of the trio, Kozo Okamoto, a twenty-four year-old former university student, were incapable of eliciting such an elementary response from him. At his trial Okamoto appeared to be a tired and not very articulate young man, drained of all emotion except a residual bitterness at the cruel trick he thought the Israelis had played on him: his first examiner had promised he could die when he told everything he knew, and now they were saying he had to live. He was finally sentenced to life imprisonment. “My mouth is unable to tell you what I feel,” he told the judge who kept questioning him about his motives.
—While investigating an explosion, Detective Murdoch infiltrates an anarchist group lead by American labour organizer Emma Goldman. —Read More:http://www.cbc.ca/murdochmysteries/episodes/season-5/evil-eye-of-egypt.html
Asked what he hoped to achieve by his participation in the massacre, he replied, no doubt truthfully, “Nothing.” He had killed, he stated, because he had been ordered to kill. “As a member of the great international army of revolution,” he amplified a little, “I was prepared to do anything for the cause.”
This cause was defined by him simply as “world revolution on behalf of the world proletariat”; not revolution of the proletariat itself as in the Marxist formulation. One might as well call it the revolution without a name, the anything revolution. And in the international revolutionary army to which Okamoto said he belonged to no part of any organized International. Devoid of an authentically internationalist doctrine, it was merely a kind of revolutionary kinship group, based on affinities of style or temper rather than on ideological concordance, which incorporated underground activists in several countries.
Okamoto had been recruited for , or assigned to, the struggle against Israeli “imperialism,” a revolutionary cause supported by some of the most reactionary elements in the Arab world under an exchange and cooperation arrangement between Japanese left-wing extremists and an agent of the Palestinian underground. He had demonstrated that he was ready to sacrifice himself in this ideologically ambiguous combat, but he probably would have been equally ready to die for a united Catholic Ireland, the FLQ in Quebec, or possibly even for a Peronist Argenina. Fanatical commitment to a revolutionary cause so vague that it is interchangeable with almost any other is a characteristic trait of modern terrorism. Just wind them up correctly and let them march off to do the deed.
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