Posted on 09/06/2006 2:26:19 AM PDT by Man50D
A follow-up that is related: it is beginning to emerge in Spain that ETA was connected with the Madrid bombings. While the latter were carried out by Muslim terrorists, it seems ETA may have been involved in the supply of the explosives, possibly training in their use, and knew about the bombing in advance. Why would they do this?
Becasue the left loves the Islamics because it loves any authoritarian ideology. Islam is also anti-modern, anti-capitalist, and would really have no problem coexisting with a Marxist economy (and we can see how well both Marxist and Muslim economies do...). One of the leaders of ETA converted to Islam a number of years ago, and it wouldn't surprise me to see more non-Islamic terrorists become Muslims. After all, Carlos the Jackal converted, and he's one of their big role models.
It's been a while, but I believe there is a chapter in the Terror Network on the ETA and it's Links.
Check also-Gayle Rivers, "The War Againste the Terrorists and How to Win It".
Former Australian SAS. Some of it over the top, but he documents the International links quite well and outlines a strategy that many here advocate-Kill, don't capture.
These books were done in the 80s, but have relevance today. Sterlings also documented the Soviet Financing of many of these groups.
As for the Basque and the Irish movements, they both came out of 19th century Romanticism, which focused on national identities, the revival of dying "national" languages (such as Gaelic, Basque and Catalan), and a rejection of industrialization. While the Irish movement was actually encouraged primarily by Anglo-Irish writers, in País Vasco and Catalonia, many of the proponents of this were clergy, who saw it as a return to the old days of rural life, the tiny, peaceful village, etc., etc.
In the case of ETA, this Basque nationalism attached itself first, strangely enough, to the conservative cause during the Carlist Wars (a fight over succession) in Spain, but later, because Pais Vasco is an industrialized region, became increasingly involved with leftist unions and other similar leftist activities. By the time of the Spanish Civil War, Pais Vasco was famous for being very left wing. After the war, the Basque movement revived in ETA, which was violent from the start, and devoted itself to killing people in Franco's government. The Socialists and all the left went easy on it for that reason, because they saw it as an ally, but after the Transition (after the death of Franco), when the Socialist Party got into power, they found they had created a monster they could not control. In the subsequent decades, they never repressed it as firmly as they should have, with the result that the overtly Marxist organization still exists and has killed more than 1000 people in Spain alone. And it has internationalized, going first to Spanish speaking countries, where its leaders could hide out and raise and launder money.
The goal of ETA in Spain is to separate País Vasco from Spain and establish a separate country, run along Marxist lines by the political wing of ETA.
In the case of Ireland, there actually was an oppressor, and even after the Irish Revolution, Irish Catholics in the North continued to suffer from legal and other restrictions, and they initially saw the IRA as something that would protect them. This, of course, was far from the truth, and the IRA essentially devolved into a combination of criminal enterprise and Marxist cadre.
Both ETA and the IRA collect the "revolutionary tax" (extortion) in their respective areas, work with other terrorist groups who are opposed to the West and capitalist democracy, and dominate through terror, assassinations, torture and kangaroo courts that "try" anyone who objects to their activities.
They don't buy commercial explosives for the same reason that no one uses correct grammar in spam, or lines of code from the "Code Red" worm. They are easy to detect. One-off exotic explosives are more likely to be undetectable by present techniques, since we tend to look for specific scenarios at the end-point of the plot, rather than going after the roots. As long as security in the West concentrates on "movie plot" threat reduction rather than going after the roots of terrorism, the terrs will always be able to find a way around the current security shield.
Forgot to add that commercial explosives, even mil-grade ones, have chemical/molecular "tags" that help identify where the explosive came from. If someone uses Semtex to bring down an airliner, the investigators would be able to detect those "tags" and trace the explosives to their source, potentially exposing a sizeable chunk of the terror network. Even if the wack-job terrs don't know this, their weapons suppliers will, and will warn them not to use commercial stuff for anything they don't want to get caught at.
One is tempted to snap off an opinion which says that such deranged worldviews cannot long stay in parallel course but must collide and, in fact, must each implode in time. That is tempting and reassuring but there is no historical basis for that according to the author. Leftism has shown its resiliency in surviving the French Revolution, the gulags, Mao, and the fall of the wall. Clearly, it is not going to go away soon. After more than a millennium, Islam is not about to disappear either despite the fact that it obviously swims in a sea of unreality.
According to the author, it is more likely that the world of the Western Enlightenment will succumb before the other two. It seems that we will be a very lucky indeed if our grandchildren can lay claim to an enlightened civilization.
It seems we must try to hold the line and divide the left from Islam and then cleave Islam into irreconcilable parts. Finally we must find what is a relatively sane in the Muslim world and set it against the crazies, for it is an asymmetrical war of attrition fought on television screens that they aim to wage and that is a war we cannot win. In fact, we are just playing into their hands now in Iraq.
I hear so often on these threads injunction by a well-meaning conservatives to kill more terrorists in Baghdad. Nothing could be more hopeless or self-defeating. It is the strategy of shoveling flies. Somehow, we have got to get Muslims fighting on our side even if they think they're fighting on theirs. Meanwhile, we must try to hold the West together, and right now that seems more like attempting to herd cats.
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