Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most troubling aspects of the plight of Flight 847 was that it was the third hijacking that occurred in the region within three days last week, and the second apparently engineered by Lebanese Shi'ites. In earlier times, Arab skyjackers tended to be Palestinians, from one or another faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, attempting to advance or at least dramatize the Palestinian cause. The politicization of Lebanon's Shi'ite Muslim community is one of the most significant and most troubling consequences of the Israeli invasion...
Over the next 28 hours, as the plane bounced around the eastern half of the Mediterranean, the skyjackers had ample time to air their complaints. They were angry about an Arab League statement supporting the cause of the Palestinians in the Beirut refugee camps, which have been under attack by Lebanese Shi'ites for the past three weeks. The Shi'ites want to drive out the Palestinians to make sure that the P.L.O. will never again be able to set up a "state within a state" in Lebanon. After several dire threats, the hijackers freed the passengers, blew...
...there could also be serious danger in not retaliating. Experts note apprehensively that terrorist attacks, airplane hijackings in particular, tend to come in clusters. A new wave of unpunished terrorism could frighten Arab moderates enough to destroy all prospect of peace negotiations with Israel; that indeed may be the terrorists' aim. Moreover, American lives are already in peril: Brian Jenkins, a Rand Corp. expert, estimates that about a third of all terrorist attacks involve Americans, more than involve the citizens of any other country. Analysts have worried in the past about the U.S.'s acquiring a reputation among terrorists...
...ites. Some 42 million of them are in Iran, where they make up 92% of the population. To the long-downtrodden underclass of Shi'ites in Lebanon, some 40% of the population, Khomeini's fundamentalist - revolution was an inspiration to rise up against their perceived oppressors: Western and Arab, Christian and Jewish. "If you develop a psychosis that the whole world is against you," says M. Cherif Bassiouni, professor of international law at Chicago's De Paul University, "then the only way to survive is to become clannish, mystical, fanatic and sometimes to lash...
...move, declared a frustrated Shultz, was an attempt "to stick the Congress's finger in King Hussein's eye." The Administration argued that now more than ever, as he pushes for peace, the King needs the weapons to defend himself against his enemies -- notably Syria, which fervently opposes an Arab-Israeli rapprochement. The Heinz-Kennedy resolution may come to nothing, but the support it found was an indication of the obstacles an arms request for Jordan will face on Capitol Hill...