Terrorism

Before September 11, 2001, many terrorist attacks had occurred against U.S.. citizens overseas: an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 worldwide in the previous twenty years. Of these, the taking of sixty-three American hostages in Iran in 1979 most deeply affected the United States; this terrorist act by militant followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of a revolutionary movement in Iran, crippled the presidency of Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) and contributed to his defeat for reelection in 1980. But the attacks by Islamic terrorists on the twin [Page p472]towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., which killed some three thousand persons and caused enormous economic losses, finally brought international terrorism home to American soil.

The roots of terrorism, which probably dates to the origins of human history, include certain individuals' frustration at being unable to bring about a desired political or religious goal and hatred of others who do not share the same ideology or who prevent the desired change. In the first century a.d. a religious sect in Palestine called Zealots conducted a campaign of terror against the Roman occupation, and later the Assassins, a messianic religious sect, operated from the eleventh century until it was brought under control by the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

A major terrorist act that got the twentieth century off to a bloody start was the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, an event that precipitated World War I. The Irish Republican Army, established in 1919 and declared illegal in 1931 and 1936, was responsible for a series of bombings in England in 1939 and continued its guerrilla warfare activities for decades afterward, all in protest against British hegemony in Northern Ireland. Hamas, originally a social welfare organization, and other Palestinian militants have for several decades conducted terrorist activities against the civilian population in Israel. In the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf terrorists forced the Philippine government in 2001 to begin an all-out offensive against them, with the aid of the United States.

Defining Terrorism