Pro-Palestinian rallies suggest that terrorists organisations of the 21st century will have a base of financial and logistical support that Carlos The Jackal, Red Army and other terrorist organisations of the 70s could not have even imagined

 by Ganesh Sahathevan 

Rallies in support of Palestine, and by extension in opposition to Israel and in support of HAMAS, continue to draw thousands in many major Western cities. Many participants appear to be migrants from the Middle East. The organisers of these rallies appear to be from the usual suspects of the 70s. Josh Lees of the Palestinian Action Group Sydney, for example, is also an organiser of the Socialist Alliance.




Brian Jenkins of the RAND Corporation reminds us:




In 1970, Palestinian terrorists upped the ante with a mass hijacking of five commercial airliners. Three of the planes, carrying hundreds of hostages, made it to a landing strip in Jordan, creating an international crisis that ended in civil war. That same year, terrorists sabotaged a Swissair flight that crash-landed, killing all 47 aboard.

By the mid-1970s, airline hijacking and airline bombings worldwide were occurring at the rate of one a month.

In 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army — allies of a Palestinian terrorist organization — opened fire on arriving passengers at an airport in Israel, killing 26, most of them Puerto Rican pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. It was not simply the carnage, but the complexity of the event that attracted attention: How was it, people asked, that the Japanese could come to Israel to kill Puerto Ricans on behalf of Palestinians?

An explanation may lie in reports from the 1980s of the former USSR training Palestinian terrorists. The links between the KGB , Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the Popular Front For The Liberation Of Palestine, and the terrorists organisations worldwide has been documented in the 1985 book "Terrorism: The Soviet Connection" by Ray Cline and Yonah Alexander.


The war cry "resistance is justified when Palestine is occupied" has been noted recently in Sydney, and it would be naive in the extreme to think that there will not be in Australia, and the other Western countries, given the already existing level of terrorist activity, a return to the terrorist activity of the 1970s, but this time backed by a passive support network far greater than anything that the PLO and its fellow travellers could have ever imagined.

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