It might seem like terrorism is a new phenomenon, but in reality it’s existed over 2000 years, according to Reachout.com. Terrorism is not a 21st century phenomenon and has its roots in early resistance and political movements. The Sicarii were an early Jewish terrorist organization founded in the first century AD with the goal of overthrowing the Romans in the Middle East. Judas of Galilee, leader of the Zealots and a key influence on the Sicarii, believed that the Jews should be ruled by God alone and that armed resistance was necessary (Roser, et al., 2013).
Unlike the Zealots, the Sicarii targeted other Jews they believed to be collaborators or traitors to the cause. The tactics employed by the Sicarii were detailed by the historian Josephus around 50AD: “they would mingle with the crowd, carrying short daggers concealed under their clothing, with which they stabbed their enemies. Then when they fell, the murderers would join in the cries of indignation and, through this plausible behavior, avoided discovery” (Horsley, 1979).
There are many other key examples of terrorism throughout history before the modern terrorism of the 20th century. Guy Fawkes’ failed attempt at reinstating a Catholic monarch is an example of an early terrorist plot motivated by religion. Meanwhile, The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution is an example of state terrorism (Roser, et al., 2013).
The term “terrorism” itself was originally used to describe the actions of the Jacobin Club during the “Reign of Terror” in the French Revolution. “Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible”, said Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre. In 1795, Edmund Burke denounced the Jacobins for letting “thousands of those hell-hounds called Terrorists … loose on the people” of France. In January 1858, Italian patriot FeliceOrsini threw three bombs in an attempt to assassinate French Emperor Napoleon III. Eight bystanders were killed and 142 injured. The incident played a crucial role as an inspiration for the development of the early terrorist groups (Crenshaw, 2018).
Arguably the first organization to utilize modern terrorist techniques was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in 1858 as a revolutionary Irish nationalist group that carried out attacks in England (Richard, 2007). The group initiated the Fenian Dynamite Campaign in 1881, one of the first modern terror campaigns. Instead of earlier forms of terrorism based on political assassination, this campaign used modern, timed explosives with the express aim of sowing fear in the very heart of metropolitan Britain in order to achieve political gains (FDC, 2017).
Another early terrorist group was NarodnayaVolya, founded in Russia in 1878 as a revolutionary anarchist group inspired by Sergei and “propaganda by the deed” theorist Carlo Pisacane. The group developed ideas—such as targeted killing of the ‘leaders of oppression’—that were to become the hallmark of subsequent violence by small non-state groups, and they were convinced that the developing technologies of the age—such as the invention of dynamite, which they were the first anarchist group to make widespread use of —enabled them to strike directly and with discrimination (BBC, 2017).
The use of terrorism to further a political cause has accelerated in recent years. Modern terrorism largely came into being after the Second World War with the rise of nationalist movements in the old empires of the European powers. These early anti-colonial movements recognized the ability of terrorism to both generate publicity for the cause and influence global policy. Bruce Hoffman, director of the Centre of Security Studies at Georgetown University writes that, “The ability of these groups to mobilize sympathy and support outside the narrow confines of their actual “theaters of operation” thus taught a powerful lesson to similarly aggrieved peoples elsewhere, who now saw in terrorism an effective means of transforming hitherto local conflicts into international issues” (Hoffman, 2013). his development paved the way for international terrorism in the 1960s.
The attacks of 11 September 2001, known as 9/11, marked a turning point in world history and the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’. The attacks are estimated to have killed 3000 people making it the deadliest terrorist incident in human history. The subsequent War on Terror led to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The following table summarizes the concentration of terrorist attacks pre- and post-9/11. It reveals that terrorism pre-9/11 was concentrated in Latin America and Asia, but shifted to the Middle East post-9/11–Peru, Chile and El Salvador completely disappear from the top 10. More than a quarter of all terrorist attacks between 9/11 and 2008 took place in Iraq (Roser, et al., 2013).
On 22 July 1968, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked Israeli El Al Flight 426 from London to Tel Aviv via Rome. They diverted the flight to Algiers where they held the Israeli hostages for several days while they negotiated the release of Arab prisoners in exchange for the hostages. Once the terms were agreed the hostages were released with no fatalities. The success of this early hijacking made it an increasingly popular weapon of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1976 ZehdiTerzi, the first PLO representative to the United Nations, stated that the “first several hijackings aroused the consciousness of the world and awakened the media and world opinion much more—and more effectively—than 20 years of pleading at the United Nations.”
Despite the intense media focus on terrorist activity around the world, the numbers of people actually killed by terrorist attacks has remained low. Terrorism only killed 13,000 in 2010, a relatively low number when compared with other types of violent death, namely armed conflict and interpersonal violence. The internet has become a central tool for terrorists, largely replacing print and other physical media. It has allowed terrorist organizations to costlessly communicate their message and aims to the world, allowing them to recruit new members, coordinate global attacks and better evade surveillance. The terrorist group known as the Islamic State (also, ISIS and ISIL) are arguably the first to harness the power of the internet and social media. Their well-organized online propaganda campaign has seen them recruit thousands of foreign fighters (Roser, et al. 2013).
References
Hoffman, B (1988). Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 167
Richard, E (2007). Irish Freedom.Pan Books, ISBN 0-330-42759-8p. 180
Roser, M et al. (2013).Terrorism. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism#note-6