Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

476 • NATIONAL SOCIALIST LIBERATION FRONTaccords with Jordan agreed to by Yasir Arafat and much of thePalestine National Council. These accords would have allowed somepolitical solution to the Palestinian problem with less than full sovereigntyor total territorial integrity of pre-1948 Palestine. The Frontwas formed on 25 March 1985 in Damascus with the Popular Frontfor the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the National Alliance, andthe Palestine Liberation Front, and several other groups opposedto Arafat. Syria and Libya, supporters of the rejectionist elementswithin the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), gave theirsupport to the NSF as an organization that could challenge Arafat’sleadership and legitimacy within the Palestinian community.From the viewpoint of Syria’s president, Hafez Al Asad, the presenceof Syrian-sponsored groups within the NSF, such as al Sa’iqaand the Fatah-Provisional Command, made the NSF appear to be apotential vehicle for Syrian policy. Also the NSF served to divideand weaken the PLO, allowing Syria to dominate Lebanon moreeasily. These calculations went awry with the outbreak of the “warof the camps” on 19 May 1985, when members of Amal, a SyriansponsoredShi’ite militia, clashed with Palestinian militia membersguarding the PLO refugee camps. In the on-again, off-again fightingthat lasted until 7 April 1987, more than 2,500 people were killed.The upshot of the war of the camps was that the NSF chose to sidewith al Fatah in defending the Palestinian camps while Amal itselfwas weakened. Rather than becoming a vassal of Syria, the NSF waslargely dominated by the PFLP, while the groups beholden to Syriawithin the NSF played only a marginal role.NATIONAL SOCIALIST LIBERATION FRONT (NSLF). TheNSLF was the most violent of the U.S. neo-Nazi groups advocatingterrorism and armed revolution to overthrow the U.S. government.After the 25 August 1967 assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell,founder and leader of the American Nazi Party, Rockwell’s successor,Matthias Koehl, changed the party’s name to the National SocialistWhite People’s Party (NSWPP) and undertook other changesthat angered Rockwell loyalists. Joe Tomassi, Karl Hand Jr., andother neo-Nazis who did not accept Koehl as Rockwell’s successorbroke away from the NSWPP in 1969 to form their own AmericanNazi party, the NSLF. The NSLF made the older American Naziparty organization the first object of its attacks but later, in the 1970s,