Hi michael97123; Early religious terrorism, the rest of the story:
Sicarii
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At the beginning of the Jewish Revolt (66), the Sicarii, with the help of other Zealots, gained access to Jerusalem and committed a series of atrocities, in order to force the population to war. In one account, given in the Talmud, they destroyed the city's food supply, so that the people would be forced to fight against the Roman siege instead of negotiating peace. Their leaders, including Menahem ben Jair, Eleazar ben Jair, and Bar Giora, were important figures in the war, and Eleazar ben Jair eventually succeeded in escaping the Roman onslaught. Together with a small group of followers, he made his way to the abandoned fortress of Masada, where he continued his resistance to the Romans until 73, when the Romans took the fortress and found that all of its defenders had committed suicide rather than surrender.
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Based on a 1903 Jewish Encyclopedia, with some additions and editing.
en.wikipedia.org
Kind of reminds you of all those Iraqis running around stirring up trouble for the modern equivalent of the Roman army. Or the Palestinian terrorists who kill Palestinians who want peace with Israel.
-- Carl
P.S. Also see, from an Israeli website, the relationship between the Sicarii and modern terrorism:
Suicide terrorism, like the slippery concept of terrorism in general, is harder to define than it may appear. For instance, are the suicide bombings in Israel really so different from previous incidents in which Palestinian gunmen and knifemen (and the occasional Israeli) launched assaults that they had little hope of surviving? They were scarcely the first to sacrifice their own lives in order to take others. In the first century AD, the Zealots and Sicarii, two Jewish sects, attacked the Roman occupiers of Judaea and their allies in public places. The Assassins, a cult active in modern Iran and Syria from the 11th to the 13th centuries, killed their targets (mainly Muslim rulers whom they considered apostates) at close range and with no escape routes. Their name comes from the Arabic hashishiyya; the drug's powers were thought to explain the Assassins' oblivious bravery.
tau.ac.il |
