LAX Attack: The View from Israel
U.S. still in post-9/11 denial?
nationalreview.com
Tel Aviv ? Here we go again. Almost one week on from the Los Angeles airport shootings American law-enforcement authorities, as well as virtually the entire world media, are continuing to refuse to countenance the idea that the attack was a terror attack ? though that is what it undoubtedly was.
As a retired Israeli intelligence official told me in Tel Aviv yesterday, the level of denial among U.S. authorities is reminiscent of a similar U.S. denial following the first El Al airline hijacking in 1968. The official said he was struck by the similarity between the reaction now and the one he had encountered in July 1968, when an El Al flight from Rome was hijacked by the PLO and forced to land in Algiers. (Passengers and crew were held hostage there, with the last of them released only 39 days later). American officials he spoke to in Washington at the time flatly refused to accept Israel's view that this was an act of terror.
Then, as now, the differing views were not just a matter of semantics. Recognizing a terror attack on American soil and taking it seriously rather than brushing it aside as "an isolated incident" ? as the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles mayor's office, and the U.S. government all appear to have done ? has serious repercussions for the U.S.'s ability to institute effective counterterrorism measures.
The Israeli intelligence official is not alone in his disappointment. The way that the U.S. authorities have so far handled the L.A. attack has dismayed people here who from bitter experience know an act of terror when they see one.
"Fury in Israel over American refusal to define attack as 'terror'," ran the headline in Maariv, Israel's second most popular newspaper on July 7. The editors at Hatzofeh, another Israeli daily, wrote (July 9), "The American reaction is very surprising, and contradicts the determination shown by the US regarding terrorism directed at its own citizens. A head-in-the-sand policy will not help. Unless the US sees reality for what it is, it will be unable to deal with terror."
BUT THAT WAS ENTEBBE
By coincidence, as Israeli journalists have noted, news of the Los Angeles attack broke in Israel just as the country's Channel One TV was broadcasting previously unseen footage of the Israeli army's rescue operation at Entebbe, Uganda exactly 26 years ago earlier. Then, on July 4, 1976, as Americans celebrated the bicentenary of their independence, Israeli commandos rescued over 100 passengers from an Air France flight that had been hijacked to Uganda a few days before.
Yet, in 1976 no media outlet had any problem describing the attack as such. Nor did they shy away from using the word terror when El Al check-in counters at international airports were attacked in the past, such as in December 1985, when Arab gunmen opened fire and threw grenades at passengers at Rome and Vienna airports, killing 18 people, or when gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons at El Al planes at Athens and Zurich airports some years before that.
That the L.A. attacks were terrorism aimed at both American and Israeli citizens was the unanimous view of Israelis of both left and right ? as it no doubt was among many ordinary Americans. For example, Shimon Peres, Israel's dovish foreign minister ? whose granddaughter was in the L.A. terminal at the time of last week's attack ? was quick to label it a terrorist act.
Since July 4, additional information has come to light to back up these initial Israeli assumptions. On Sunday, July 8, the London-based daily Al Hayat, one of the Arab world's more reliable newspapers, revealed that Hesham Muhammad Ali Hadayet, the Egyptian perpetrator of the Los Angeles attack, most likely met twice with Dr. Ayman Zuwahri, one of al Qaeda's senior terror organizers, in 1995 and in 1998. (Al-Zawahiri, who was then head of the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad went on to become Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, following Egyptian Islamic Jihad's merger with al Qaeda. His current whereabouts are unknown.)
It has also been separately reported that in Irvine, California, Hadayet had Koranic verses about jihad tacked to his apartment door. Several witnesses have said that as Hadayet carried out his attack, he shouted "God is great" in Arabic ? a common cry by the perpetrators of suicide attacks.
Furthermore Hadayet ? who sent his wife and two young children to Egypt a week before the attack even though they had been due to stay in the U.S. with him to celebrate his birthday ? regularly made other "virulent anti-Israeli remarks, according to Hadayet's former employees, such as Syrian-born Abdul Zahab. These included the allegation that "Israelis are trying to destroy the Egyptian nation by sending prostitutes with AIDS to Egypt."
The allegation is of course utterly ridiculous. It is, however, one of the common anti-Semitic canards widely circulated in the literature of Arab terror groups, as well as in state-controlled Arab newspapers. But because the international media all but ignores the hate and incitement against Jews and Israelis that permeates much of the Arab world, and does not recognize this incitement to be one of the prime causes of terror against Israelis, perhaps we should not be surprised that the FBI are being so slow in putting two and two together.
It might have been enough to reflect that the gunman had shown up at an international airport armed to the teeth, carrying no identification and no airline ticket, and out of all airlines he had gone to the El Al ticket counter, although it was located at the far end of the terminal. Yet even after it had also been revealed that he was a Muslim militant, an FBI official was able to say "this is quiet possibly a random act of violence."
FAMILY PROBLEMS?
Richard Garcia, the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation stressed that Hadayet "might simply have been despondent for some as yet unknown reason, perhaps a financial problem or a family dispute, and that despair drove him to violence." (It may well be that Hadayet had personal problems. Most terrorists do.) Garcia added that it was "very difficult to determine the exact motive" for the shooting. (It is difficult to know what the exact motive of the September 11 attackers was either, other than to kill innocent people.)
FBI spokesman Matt McLaughlin admitted that "Hadayet had extra ammunition and magazines ready to go," but hastened to add "We have absolutely no evidence that this is an act of terror." Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn added his own disclaimer: "We have no information that this incident was connected to terrorism." California Governor Gray Davis also tried to downplay the attack.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer supported the FBI's initial conclusions, and its refusal to pinpoint the motives and character of the attack, saying the U.S. lacks information suggesting the attack was an act of terror.
Others argued that Hadayet did not qualify as a "terrorist" because he was not on any of the U.S. government's "watch lists" for individuals associated with terror organizations. (I don't recall all of the Sept. 11 terrorists as being on U.S. government watch lists, either, or any organization claiming responsibility in the immediate aftermath of those attacks).
DOES THE FBI OWN A DICTIONARY?
In fact by any common definition this was a terror attack. Even if the U.S. government hasn't been able to find Osama bin Laden, and was a little slow in realizing that Yasser Arafat engaged in terrorism, one would hope that they might be able to find a dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, defines "terror" as "extreme fear; the use of such fear to intimidate people, especially for political reasons; a person or thing that causes extreme fear."
The original international definition of a terror attack, that laid out in 1937 by the League of Nations was a "criminal act directed against a state and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons, or a group of persons or the general public."
Even according to the FBI's own definition (from the bureau's 1999 publication, "Terrorism in the United States") this looks like a terror attack. The manual calls terrorism an "unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political and social objectives." Yet, at the L.A. Times reported, "the FBI seemed to ignore its own definition of terrorism in favor of a more limited State Department definition."
Many Israelis wonder, though, whether the FBI might have not have used the word "terrorism" if an Arab gunman had approached a line of 80 passengers waiting not an El Al check-in desk but at an American Airlines desk at an international airport on July 4, and shot dead two American civilians, wounded seven others, and attempted to kill dozens more.
Had Hadayet attacked another airline rather than El Al, which alone at L.A. airport had armed security officers, the final death toll may well have proven far worse. Hadayet was only seconds into his assault ? he had come heavily armed with the two fully loaded guns, spare magazines and ammunition, and a six-inch-long hunting knife ? and managed to fire just ten of his bullets, killing two civilians and wounding seven others, before he was shot dead by the alert El Al security officer. If he had struck at another airline counter, perhaps dozens of people would have been killed and injured. (Having worked in and around the airport for the best part of ten years, Hadayet almost certainly knew that El Al security guards would shoot him, and this seems very likely to have been a suicide attack.)
AN ALTERCATION THAT GOT OUT OF HAND?
Taking their cue from the U.S. government, the media lost no time in putting their heads in the sand. Within minutes of the shooting, the broadcast media collectively seemed at pains to stress that there was no evidence that this was a terror attack and instead put forward other theories. Perhaps it was a "work dispute," they suggested. One broadcaster even speculated that it may have been an "altercation that got out of hand," and a CNN reporter even helpfully reminded viewers that "California is a place where a lot of people walk about carrying around guns."
In the ensuing days, the world's print media came up with whatever theory they could other than terror. (Al-Hayat's story, widely repeated in the Israeli press, seems to have been barely covered in the European or American media.) Among the headlines in the British press, for example, were "Egyptian infuriated by US flags named as LA gunman" (Guardian, June 6); "Killer held grudge over flag" (Daily Telegraph, June 6); "Killer was driven by hate of US" (Daily Telegraph, June 6); "Limo row blamed for attack" (Sunday Telegraph, June 7); "Marriage problems may have driven airport gunman to kill" (The Sunday Times, June 7); "HATE, NOT TERRORISM" (headline in The Mirror, Britain's second highest circulation newspaper, June 6).
"Fears that the shooting could have been a terrorist attack appeared unfounded," said the (London) Independent on July 5 in the first paragraph of its report on the shooting. The Daily Telegraph noted that Hadayet had supposedly been in "a bitter feud with his upstairs neighbour in the two-storey apartment block."
Even when terror was raised as a possibility, it was done in quotation marks. The British-run news agency Reuters wrote (July 5) "U.S. investigators are still seeking to establish whether Hadayet, who had been a U.S. resident since 1992 and had no known ties to groups the United States calls "terrorists," was motivated by hatred or despondency over a personal crisis." (Never shy of double standards when the perpetrators of terrorism are not Islamic fanatics, Reuters used the word terrorism without any quotation marks in a story the day before, on July 4, about the Greek group known as November 17.)
BEGINNINGS OF 9/11-STYLE CONSPIRACIES?
Meanwhile in the Arab press, we already have the beginnings of a Sept. 11-style conspiracy theory that Hadayet didn't carry out the attack at all. Even the more moderate Arab papers, such as the Saudi-owned London-based daily Asharq Al-Awsat, is already stating that Hadayet is only "accused" of carrying out the attack, suggesting he may not be the perpetrator. No doubt stories that Jews killed themselves, as they did on Sept. 11, and in the Holocaust, and in the pogroms and in the crusades, will soon surface in other Arab state-sponsored publications.
In the Western media, the lack of acknowledgement and understanding about Arab terror is not new. The New York Times took many days before acknowledging that the attack on the Tunisian synagogue last fall, which killed 24 people, was an act of terror (al Qaeda later admitted responsibility). Only in the Middle East was it abundantly clear from the start that that attack ? also the result of "a lone individual" this time using a truck rather than a gun ? was a planned act of terror.
For days after the July 4 attack, the media have continued to carry stories exemplified by the report that: "The FBI says it still doesn't know why Hesham Mohamed Hadayet targeted the ticket area of Israel's national airline" (Associated Press, July 8)
The idea that Hadayet needed a direct personal order from someone such as Yasser Arafat or Osama bin Laden to carry out his attack on Israelis for it to be characterized as a "terror attack" rather than "isolated incident," "hate crime," or "despondent act" shows how little Western officials still seem to understand about the methods and mentality of Islamic and Arab terror groups.
As the Jerusalem Post said, such an idea "is misguided about the nature of terrorism in general, and about the nature of the enemy America is facing in specific. Haven't bin Laden and other Islamic terrorist leaders publicly called on individual Muslims like Hadayet to commit such acts? And when they do, isn't that terrorism, pure and simple?? This was no "isolated incident." The enemies of America vowed to commit a terror strike on American soil on July 4 and they succeeded. America needs to clearly acknowledge this fact, draw the necessary conclusions, and then act on them as swiftly as possible."
U.S. officials would do well to listen to the Israelis ? who in matters of terror have been proved right many times in the past. It seems that even after Sept. 11, American and European officials and media are still on a very slow learning curve.
? Tom Gross a former Middle East reporter for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News. His most recent piece for NRO was on the British media and Jeningrad. |
