No. 108, 1 July 2011 / 29 Sivan 5771

 

Terrorist Incidents against Jewish Communities and Israeli Citizens Abroad, 1968-2010

 

Michael Whine

● The phenomenon of terrorism against Jewish communities and Israeli targets abroad represents the most violent aspect of contemporary anti-Semitism, and the greatest physical danger to Diaspora Jewish communities. The rational calculations of political violence and the irrational fantasies of extreme ideologies can combine to threaten the lives of ordinary Jews and others all over the world. This clarifies in the starkest terms why Jewish communities require security at their synagogues, schools, and community buildings.

● Many terrorist groups that target Jews are rooted in political ideologies that incorporate anti-Semitism. Neo-Nazi groups adhere to the view that Jews are racially inferior and conspire to destroy the white race. Islamist terrorists believe that Jews are morally inferior and conspire to undermine and destroy Islam. Leftist terrorist groups that have targeted Jews have often conflated anti-Semitism with their anti-American and anticapitalist viewpoints. The idea that Jews, Zionism, or are preventing the creation of a new, better world is common across different extremist ideologies.

 

● The most devastating terrorist acts in recent years have involved car bombs or bombs delivered in bags or belts and triggered remotely, or by suicide bombers. However, Western scrutiny over the sale of domestic chemicals, which are core constituents of homemade explosives, may herald a new trajectory: that of multiple-site armed attacks using firearms, perhaps purchased through criminal associations. Military strategists have been warning for some years that substate violent groups would adopt the tactic of "swarming," aided by the communications revolution, so as to defeat larger military or security forces.

 

● The growth of Salafi jihadist terrorism poses the greatest threat to Jewish communal security. Previously the main perpetrators of anti-Jewish terrorism had overwhelmingly been Palestinian secular terrorists; neo-Nazis and white supremacists; and radical leftists. Of the fifty-one recorded attacks and prevented plots from 2002 to 2010, thirty-nine were carried out by Al-Qaeda, its affiliates, Lashkar-e-Toiba, or other individuals or groups inspired by the ideology of the global jihad movement.

 Introduction

The phenomenon of terrorism against Jewish communities and Israeli targets abroad represents the most violent aspect of contemporary anti-Semitism, and the greatest physical danger to Diaspora Jewish communities. It demonstrates how the rational calculations of political violence and the irrational fantasies of extreme ideologies can combine to threaten the lives of ordinary Jews and others all over the world. It clarifies in the starkest terms why Jewish communities require security at their synagogues, schools, and community buildings.

 

When the first edition of this report was published in 2003, it was the first time that the history of post-1967 anti-Jewish terrorism had been collated comprehensively. It showed that Jewish communities and Israeli-linked targets outside have been attacked by violent extremists from diverse backgrounds: neo-Nazis, Marxist-Leninists, anarchists, Palestinian and other Arab nationalists, Khomeinite revolutionaries, and radical Sunni Islamists. In the intervening seven years since this chronology was first published, this picture has come to be dominated by the new wave of terrorism perpetrated by Salafi jihadists linked to, or supportive of, Al-Qaeda. These are referred to collectively as the global jihad movement, which targets Je! ws as part of wider terrorist campaigns in Western and Muslim countries.

This new report also demonstrates that many terrorists do not make a clear distinction between Jewish and Israeli targets outside Israel, either in their ideology, their propaganda, or - most important - in their targeting.

Terrorism and Anti-Semitism

 

Many terrorist groups that target Jews are rooted in political ideologies that incorporate anti-Semitism. Neo-Nazi groups, for example, adhere to the view that Jews are racially inferior and conspire to destroy the white race. Islamist terrorists of both Shia and Sunni varieties believe that Jews are morally inferior and conspire to undermine and destroy Islam. Leftist terrorist groups that have targeted Jews have often conflated anti-Semitism with their anti-American and anticapitalist viewpoints. The belief in a Jewish or Zionist conspiracy is common to the ideologies that drive most terrorist groups that target Jews and . The idea that Jews, Zionism, or are preventing the creation of a new, better world for all is also common across different extremist ideologies.

 

This ideological anti-Semitism, with its conspiratorial and millennial fantasies, combines with real-world grievances such as the Israel-Palestine conflict to create a specific threat to Jews and their communities from terrorist groups of different hues. For many extremists, and Jews are closely linked in a symbiotic and mutually supportive relationship. They believe that attacking Jewish communities, which are sometimes considered soft targets, may undermine 's national resolve. In addition, Jews are perceived as a particular enemy, as opposed to a general opponent such as the West or global capitalism. Jews are not the primary target for m! any terrorists; these are currently the and countries with military forces in and . The extent to which terrorists consider Jews a primary target may depend in part on how much traditional anti-Semitic tropes dominate their worldview.

 Terrorist threats to Jews in the twenty-first century come mainly from three directions: the global jihad movement (i.e., Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and followers); and its surrogates; and neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Far-left and anarchist groups carried out many terrorist attacks against Jewish communities in the 1970s and 1980s. Although some residual groups of this type remain in , , , and Latin America , there is now less financial backing or training available for them than there was from the Soviet bloc before its implo! sion. Consequently, the terror threat from this quarter is currently low.

 The decline in the leftist terrorism that wracked Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, and the more recent growth of Salafi jihadist terrorist attacks, reflects a wider shift from state-backed terrorism to autonomous terrorist groups and networks. This has had a degrading impact on their ability to successfully execute terrorist attacks, as evidenced by the relatively high proportion of plots by Al-Qaeda and unaffiliated global jihadists that were intercepted before they could reach fruition.

 In assessing the ongoing threat to Jewish communities, it should be noted that British, American, Israeli, and other security services have sometimes publicized their interdiction of terrorist plots against Jewish and Israeli targets. Jewish communities continue to receive discreet warnings to enhance security at communal buildings, and in some countries they receive extra police protection.

 Islamist Anti-Semitism

In several recently foiled plots, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the global jihad movement planned to attack Jewish institutions and individuals. Elements of their now widespread ideology manifest a contemporary version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the czarist-era forgery that provided the rationale and underpinning for twentieth-century anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and that now propels jihadist terrorists to attack Jews.

 

This forgery and its modern variants are now widely available throughout the Muslim world, and it is referred to directly or indirectly in some of the basic documents of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and others.[1]

 The core ideological statement of Hamas, its charter, contains many anti-Jewish themes and comments, among which Article 32 states:

 the Zionist plan has no limits, and after Palestine they want to expand [their territory] from the Nile to the Euphrates, and when they finish devouring one area, they hunger for further expansion and so on, indefinitely. The plan is expounded in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present behavior is the best proof for what we are saying.[2]

 

Anti-Semitism appears to be growing in the Muslim world, as a consequence of the Islamist influence on traditional Muslim views of Jews as protected but subservient to Islam, as the Pew Research Center established in its 2009 survey of attitudes in twenty-five countries. It found, for example, that 98 percent of Lebanese, 97 percent of Jordanians, and 95 percent of Egyptians hold unfavorable views of Jews. The coming to power of an Islamist government in may have been a reason for the jump from 32 percent in 2004 to 73 percent there in 2009. Unsurprisingly, a recent large-scale poll in Muslim countries normally described as moderate indicated that there was widespread support for Palestinian terrorism and little empathy for Jewis! h suffering during the Holocaust[3]

Antagonistic references to Israelis are therefore very often couched in anti-Jewish terms, thereby promoting the Israel-Palestine conflict to the level of religious conflict, rather than a territorial dispute.

Radical Muslim religious leaders, whether Palestinian or not, often frame their arguments in this way. For example, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, Sheikh Himam Sa'id, stated in an address to Palestinians in Hebron that "you are now waging a war against the Jews. You are well versed in this. We saw how, on a day in 1929, you slaughtered the Jews in Hebron . Today, slaughter them in the land of Hebron . Kill them in Palestine ."[4]

 

 

Anti-Jewish references are now commonplace in Islamist, and particularly Salafi jihadist, texts and other publications. Among the many recent examples in Europe, it is worth noting that the Al-Qaeda terrorist Andrew Rowe, who was arrested by the French authorities as he was returning to the UK in October 2003, was said by prosecuting counsel at his 2005 trial in London to have been carrying audio cassettes of militant sermons about the obligation to wage jihad against "unjust Christians and aggressive Jews" and demanding that Muslim lands be liberated from "the sons of the monkeys and pigs," a derogatory reference to Jews.[5] In 1999, Abu Qatada, said to have been the senior Al-Qaeda representative in the , gave a blessing for the killing of Jews in a mosque address, according to evidence cited by the Special Immigration Appeal Commission in March 2004 when it turned down his appeal to be freed from detention.[6]

 Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Abul Ala Mawdudi, the founder of Jamaat e-Islami, and Sayid Qutb, the post-Second World War ideologue of the Brotherhood, all believed in a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. In Qutb's exposition of radical political Islam, Milestones, he formulated an ideology of Islamism and its violent jihadist derivative.[7] For Qutb, contemporary Islam had lapsed into a state of darkness (jahiliyah) that could only be overthrown by violence. According to his program, non-Islamic religions, particularly the Jews - for whom he reserved particular opprobrium - would be required to accept Islamic dominance.

 In his later work, Our Struggle with the Jews, Qutb went further, asserting that the struggle between Islam and Judaism must continue because Jews would only be satisfied with the destruction of Islam. Therefore, Muslims must fight against Jewish treachery and subjugate the Jews:

 The Jews have confronted Islam with enmity from the moment the Islamic state was established in Medina .the Muslim community continues to suffer the same Jewish machinations and double dealing which discomforted the early Muslims.. This is a war which has not been extinguished.for close on fourteen centuries its blaze has raged in all the corners of the earth and continues to this moment.[8]

The underlying anti-Semitic sentiments are echoed by Qutb's successors in Al-Qaeda and the global jihad movement. The latter's foremost ideologue, Abu Mus'ab al-Suri, wrote in his Global Islamic Call that among the most important targets were

 all kinds of Zionist or American delegations, responsible for normalization of relations with Israel. and that the important targets in America and Western countries included media personalities and media centers that are leading the war against the Muslims and justifying the attacks on them, coming from the Zionists and Zionist-friendly Crusader media institutions.[9]

 In the same document he also wrote that, although jihadists should not attack places of worship, they should attack "places where Jews are gathered, their leading personalities and institutions in Europe ."[10]

 

Ayman al-Zawahiri, now the leader of Al-Qaeda, has published several calls to attack Jews, in addition to Israelis. In his book Knights under the Prophet's Banner, published in the London-based mainstream newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat in December 2001, he wrote:

Tracking down the Americans and the Jews is not impossible. Killing them with a single bullet, a stab, or a device made up of a popular mix of explosives or hitting them with an iron rod is not impossible. Burning down their property with Molotov cocktails   is not difficult. With the available means, small groups could prove to be a frightening horror for the Americans and the Jews.[11]

In April 2008 he endorsed "every operation against Jewish interests" and promised to "strive as much as we can to deal blows to the Jews inside and outside it."[12] He also ! called specifically for attacks on Jews outside : Today there is no room for he who says that we should only fight the Jews in Palestine .. Let us strike their interests everywhere, just like they gathered against us from everywhere.[13]

Shortly thereafter he released a videotape in which he responded to a question as to why Al-Qaeda avoided attacking :

Does the person asking the question not know that Al-Qaeda struck the Jews in Djerba, and Israeli tourists in their hotel in Mombasa . We promise our Muslim brothers that we will do our best to strike the Jews both inside and outside , and with the help of Allah, we will succeed. In the same video he went on to call on mujahideen to "attack Crusader and Jewish interests everywhere."[14] During the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and southern Israel in December 2008 and January 2009, Zawahiri called on Muslims everywhere to "fight against the Zionist-Christian campaign, and strike its interests wherever you encounter them.[and] so thwart the efforts of these traitors by striking the interests of the enemies of Islam - namely, the Christians and the Jews - wherever and by whatever means you can."[15]

 The leading theological influence on the contemporary Muslim Brotherhood, and on Hamas following the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Despite his stated objection to the indiscriminate violent jihad practiced by Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, he frequently makes anti-Semitic statements. His messages influence Palestinian Islamists and their supporters worldwide.  In his 2007 "Fatwa on Palestine " he wrote:

[We] believe that the battle between us and the Jews is coming. Such a battle is not driven by nationalistic causes or patriotic belonging: it is rather driven by religious incentives. The battle is not going to happen between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews and anybody else.  It is between Muslims and Jews as is clearly stated in the hadith. This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews, i.e., all Muslims and Jews.[16]

In an anti-Semitic broadcast on Al Jazeera television during the  2008-2009 war in Gaza , he stated:

Oh Allah, take your enemies, the enemies of Islam. Oh Allah. Take the Jews, the treacherous aggressors. Oh Allah, take this profligate, cunning, arrogant band of people. Oh Allah, they have spread much tyranny and corruption in the land. Pour your wrath upon them. Oh our God. Lie in wait for them.. Oh Allah take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.[17]

Anti-Semitism in Muslim countries, however, is by no means confined to political Islamists. The late Dr. Muhammad Sayyad Tantawi, sheikh of the prestigious seat of learning at Cairo's Al-Azhar University , wrote his 1969 doctoral dissertation on what he called the roots of violence in Jewish civilization from the arrival of the Jews in to their departure. Extracts serialized in recent editions of the Egyptian daily Al-Masri Al-Youm characterized Jews as selfish and arrogant liars, quick to adopt crime and aggression, who are to be excluded from God's mercy.  In these serializations Tantawi endorsed two of the central themes of historic anti-Semitism, the blood libel and The Protocols:

[Tantawi's] study examines an assortment of murders and assassinations that were recorded by the [Roman] historian Cassius [Dio] in the 78th volume [of his works], the most egregious of which is that "the Jews in the second century AD massacred the Romans and Greeks, ate their flesh, skinned them, split many of their bodies in two from the head down, and cast many of them to predatory beasts, to the extent that the number of dead reached 220,000.[18]

[Tantawi's] study states that the most notorious of these crimes [the use of Gentiles' blood for baking matzoh] was what occurred in 1840 [in Damascus ], when it was proven that [the Jews] murdered Father Toma and his servant.[! 19]

About The Protocols, he wrote that,

The leaders of the Jews held 23 conferences between 1897 and 1951.there they decided on their secret plan to enslave the entire world under the crown of a king descendent from David, may he rest in peace.[20]

 Salafi Jihadist Terrorism against Jewish Communities

Unsurprisingly, given the incitement against Jews in their public discourse, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and supporters in the global jihad movement seek to attack Jewish targets. Jews are not always their primary targets, but they are important secondary objectives. Attacking them fulfills a basic element of the Salafi jihadist strategy.

The cross-examination of Al-Qaeda's operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, published in March 2007, revealed that attacks on Jews featured very high on the organization's list of priorities. In listing Al-Qaeda's successful and unsuccessful attacks, he noted that he was responsible for efforts to hit Israeli targets in , , , , and the and Israeli flights into and out of Bangkok and Mombasa, and that he provided financial support for others to attack Jewish targets in the  Recent investigations note that a February 2002 meeting in Istanbul between leaders of the Moroccan Islamist Combatant Group, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (which has since renounced terrorism), Tunisian jihadists and others almost certainly led to the plans for the 2002 attacks in Djerba and Casablanca, the second attack in Casablanca a year later in 2003 and the Madrid bombing of 2004. It is now known that the participants agreed that jihad should not be limited to the immediate conflict zones, but should be carried into the countries from which members of these groups originated, or in which they were residing.

 Additional information suggests that the agreement to do so also reached into East Asia . While the primary reason for the agreement was the desire to force the United States and its allies out of Iraq (and this was spelled out in Bin Laden's October 2003 audio message on Al Jazeera in which he threatened Spain, the United States, and five other countries), a second objective was clearly the wish to attack Jewish targets.[22]

 Training instructions posted to an internet forum in 2008 warned Salafi jihadists not to attack religious figures, but prioritized targets as follows:

Jews, but Jews from and the took priority over British and French Jews; Christians; apostates.[23] The reali! ty, however, is that synagogues in the Middle East and North Africa and elsewhere have often been priority targets, as the April 2002 Djerba and November 2003 Istanbul bombings indicate.

A new threat has arisen with the internationalization of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), which has sought cover under its parent organization Jamaat ud Dawa since its 2008 banning by the Pakistani government. It remains independent of Al-Qaeda, but aspires to a role beyond that of liberating Kashmir .

 The assault on the Mumbai Chabad-Lubavitch Center at Nariman House in 2008 was followed by at least one, and possibly two more attempted assaults on Jewish targets in , by people who had current or previous connections to LeT. On 17 February 2010, seventeen persons died in an attack on the German Bakery, a popular meeting place in Pune ( Poona ). The chief minister of Maharashtra state later told members of the Legislative Assembly that the attack had originally been planned against the local Chabad center, but the te! rrorists were deterred by increased security around the building.[24] On 13 March 2010, police and army units surrounded the Paradesi Synagogue in Cochin Kerala, the oldest synagogue in , after a terrorist alert by the Home Ministry, thereby forestalling a further expected attack.[25]

 Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving member of the terrorist group that attacked in Mumbai, revealed that the assault was planned and implemented by LeT, and that reconnaissance for it had been carried out by David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-born American citizen who had scouted other Jewish and Israeli targets in India and who also carried out surveillance on targets in Denmark, including Jewish institutions. What also emerged was evidence that some Pakistani government intelligence officers were involved in the Mumbai attacks. They would have provided the capacities and the international reach of a government institution, which a local terrorist group would have lacked. Headley confirmed this in his own interrogations by the authori! ties.[26]

Anti-Jewish rhetoric has also been employed by the Pakistani Taliban, a separate entity from the Afghan Taliban, while threatening in July 2010 to attack . Their spokesman added that, "For us, whether they are Hindus or Jews, they all are the same. Soon, we will teach a lesson. 's defeat at the hands of the Mujahideen is written in our religious books."[27]

Iranian-Inspired Terror

Terror attacks are not limited to Al-Qaeda-linked Sunni Islamists. Terrorism by and its surrogates predates Al-Qaeda by a decade and still poses a threat. The late Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini and his successors, especially current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have repeatedly threatened with destruction. Although Khomeini criticized Jews, the Islamic regime has mostly not terrorized its own Jewish population, notwithstanding periodic outbursts of repression.

During the 1980s and 1990s, however, and Hizbollah repeatedly carried out terrorist attacks against Jewish or Israeli targets outside . They included: the bombings of Jewish communal institutions in Paris in September 1986 by Lebanese Shiites under Hizbollah control; a failed car bombing against a Jewish community building in Bucharest in 1992, later discovered to have been carried out by Hizbollah; a failed ambush against Turkish Jewish leader Jacques Kimche in January 1993 by the Iran-linked Persevering Workers of Islam group; the truck-bomb attack against the Buenos Aires Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) headquarters in July 1994, now known to have been ! ordered by Iranian government leaders, which killed eighty-five people. The Iranian-born head of the Shiite community in Malmö, was expelled in December 1994 for gathering operational intelligence against the local Jewish community.[28]

Following the 2006 war between and Hizbollah in , calls to attack Jews were made in some Iranian media outlets. For example:

Isn't it true that many sensitive centres of the Zionists, Americans and some pro-Israel European countries are in the hands of Muslims. Isn't it true that there is easy access to many Zionists in different parts of the world? Therefore which human and legal rule can prevent an attack against such centres and individuals?... Why shouldn't Muslim nations attack the supporters of the Zionists in nooks and corners of the world