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The last time I launched this weekly series was January 2020. As I explained in an earlier take on this:
[O]ne of the points that I try to impress upon my students is that, as a form of political action, terrorism has been around for far longer than our current post-9/11 awareness would lead most Americans to acknowledge.
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| Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League (Credit: Southern Poverty Law Center) |
In this year when we are marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (a topic I’ll return to later in the week), I think it is especially important to give ourselves a little perspective about the extent to which terrorism has, or has not, been a part of our own country’s history. To that end, I am making a change in the source that I am going to use for each week’s installment.
In the past I have relied mainly on the counterterrorism calendar that had been produced annually from 2003-2016 and made available to the public by the National Counterterrorism Center. Unfortunately, this office, like many others, became a casualty of the flight of competent people out of government service during the Trump era and the calendar is no longer produced. Go online to look for it now, and you wind up here, at a literal dead end.
One of the handicaps of that resource, however, was its fairly narrow focus on terrorist incidents targeting the United States and its friends, especially if the attacks were perpetrated by Islamist groups. In the first years after 9/11 I suppose that myopic look made some sense. But frankly, it was far too limited to give a real picture of the extent to which terrorism has been a global phenomenon fueled by a wide array of ideological motivations, not just jihadism.
The NCTC calendar also overemphasized terrorism perpetrated by transnational actors compared to our own homegrown domestic terrorists. This shortcoming misrepresents the reality of terrorism as it has historically been experienced in the United States. As I’ve written many times in this space, the story of terrorism in the United States is largely characterized by attacks on Americans, by Americans, in pursuit of goals deeply embedded in America’s social and political culture.
In short, Americans have literally been at war with America for as long as we care to remember.
So for this series of This Week in Terrorism History posts, I am relying solely on incidents compiled in the Global Terrorism Database, widely considered the gold-standard data source for academic and policy research on terrorism. Each week I will randomly select a year from 1970 to 2001 and then search for attacks for that specific week that occurred within the United States.
With that long introduction out of the way, here’s this week’s entry.
- Sept. 14, 1972 — Los Angeles, CA: Members of the Jewish Defense League bomb the apartment of Palestinian activist Mohammed Shaath. After the bombing, the Los Angeles Times received a phone call taking responsibility for the attack. The caller signed off with the phrase “never again,” the slogan of the Jewish Defense League. The JDL claimed that Shaath was targeted because he was a member of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. No one was injured in the attack, and at least one perpetrator, Robert Manning, was convicted in the incident. He received a suspended sentence after he disavowed the JDL in the courtroom during his trial.
⏭Professor Peter Trumbore blogs @ Observations/Research/Diversions.
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