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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Civil Fights: What George Habash understood |
| 2008-03-28 |
| You have to admire George Habash. Granted, he was a mass murderer. But, as the muted response to recent protests in Tibet underscores, his understanding of both human nature and international politics was unsurpassed. Habash, who died in January, founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small terrorist group that grabbed world attention in the 1960s and 1970s with high-profile airline hijackings and bombings. Other Palestinian groups soon followed suit. Given the outrage and horror that greeted these attacks, people without Habash's sophisticated understanding of how the world works might have thought them counterproductive. But Habash knew better. As he explained to the German magazine Der Stern in 1970: "For decades, world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now." |
| Posted by:Fred |