Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

lxxiv • INTRODUCTIONrevolution to neighboring Muslim states, and the very same IslamicRevolutionary Guards Corps that acts as an organ of state repressionwithin Iran has set up training camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley to trainHezbollah guerrillas and terrorists bent on establishing an Islamic statein Lebanon and on destroying the State of Israel. Meanwhile, Israel developedits own corps of quiet killers, known as the Wrath of God, whoengaged in the limited pursuit of tracking down and killing Palestiniansor others considered to be responsible for terrorist actions against Israel,such as the Black September operatives who planned and executed theMunich Olympics massacre, or else considered to be public enemies ofIsrael, such as the former PLO leader Khalil al Wazir. In fact, it is thiswide range of possible motives enjoyed by each of the actor types thatmakes state sponsorship of terrorism at all possible.Of course, classification schemes do not accommodate all cases perfectly.There are at least two types of terrorist groups that are anomalies,namely, what this dictionary describes as “anarchistic leftists” and stateco-opting groups.Augustus Norton and others have used “anarchist” or “anarchistic” asan additional classification. One can argue that anarchists, too, should fallunder the heading of “revolutionary” since they seek a revolutionary transformationof the nation-state system to a nonstate system, which entails theoverall transformation of existing regimes. While few groups today openlyidentify themselves as being anarchist, there was a type of revolutionarygroup that espoused tentatively revolutionary socialist goals while behavingfor all practical purposes as if its goals were anarchistic. During thestudent radicalism of the late 1960s, a number of similar student groupsemerged in Europe, North America, and Japan that spoke the language ofthe New Left but ultimately appeared to pursue terrorist violence as anend in itself rather than as a strategy to achieve revolution. Despite theirself-identification with a world socialist revolution, they amounted to littlemore than practicing anarchists, or perhaps even nihilists, insofar as theylimited their purposes to destroying the existing capitalist states rather thanbuilding the foundations of some successor socialist state. While this typeof group does form a subspecies of the revolutionary terrorist groups, it issufficiently different from other revolutionary groups to deserve its owndistinctive label of “anarchistic leftist terrorists.”The other anomalous group type is that of nonstate groups that areso powerful relative to a weak, or weakened, state that they are able topenetrate the apparatus of state power and to usurp government power