Fighting Terrorism by Benjamin Netanyahu Read Free Book Online

had clearly begun to practice terror against German targets, their association with attacks against American servicemen could not be explained by any of the information available from previous crimes. The key to the mystery was found in an ideological tract published in 1982 by two West German radicals, Walter Hexel and Odfried Hepp, entitled Farewell to Hitlerism . In it, Hexel and Hepp renounced the traditional Nazi hostility toward Soviet Communism, identifying American imperialism as a hostile occupying force from which West Germany had to be freed through a “liberation struggle” by a renewed Nazism. The idea of an anti-Western Nazism sympathetic to the Soviet Union eventually led to the identification of Hexel and Hepp as the leaders of a new terrorist group, which was eventually found to have been trained in Lebanon by the Soviet-sponsored PLO and to have mounted the attacks in collusion with Abul Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front faction. 1
    Of course, there is something laudable in the efforts of Western democracies to hold their governments to the highest possible standards when it comes to respecting the rights of their citizens—including not having intelligence gathered about them. From the days of Robespierre’s infamous Committee for Public Safety,
democracies have had to guard against this danger, couched in terms of national security, which unduly invades the privacy of each citizen in the name of national security. Yet the threat to the basic civic rights of not fighting terrorism are even more debilitating to a free society. We often forget the monstrous violation of personal rights which is the lot of the victims of terror and their families, or the wholesale violation of the rights of entire citizenries when they are forced to expend time and resources to protect themselves against potential terrorist attacks—not to mention the more subtle violation of basic human rights involved when a person, or an entire people, must learn to live in fear.
    The belief that freedom of speech and religion are absolutes that cannot be compromised even in the slightest way out of very real security concerns is merely tantamount to replacing one kind of violation of rights with another, even worse violation of those same rights. It is evident that such terror-inflicted violations of the civil rights of a people may, if attacks are an extraordinary rarity, be insufficient to justify taking any kind of serious action; but it is equally evident that there is some point at which terror becomes by far the bigger threat to citizens’ rights and the time comes to take unflinching action. In this regard, there is apparently a moment of truth in the life of many modern democracies when it is clear that the unlimited defense of civil liberties has gone too far and impedes the protection of life and liberty, and governments decide to adopt active measures against the forces that menace their societies. In Britain, that moment
came in 1973, after IRA violence had reached unprecedented heights. That year the British Parliament passed an Emergency Provisions Act, providing for arrest, search and seizure without a warrant, relaxed rules of evidence, trials conducted by lone judges (to avoid intimidated juries), and outlawing membership in a terrorist organization. For Germany, the moment of truth came in 1976, with the kidnapping and murder of the industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer by the Baader-Meinhof group. The result was a revolution in German criminal law giving the security services an extended right of detention without warrant, as well as a substantial removal of constraints on search and seizure. For Italy, the moment came in 1978, with the abduction and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, which led the Italians to give their security services powers similar to those adopted in Germany, plus a special amnesty law allowing terrorists to turn themselves in and become state’s witnesses. In