Word: gaddafi
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...Terrorism and the support of "revolutionary movements" are tenets of Gaddafi's foreign policy. Gaddafi in fact seems hardly to have met a terrorist he didn't like--or support. In addition to funding the radical fringes of Palestinian organizations, his hand and pocketbook have been seen behind Colombia's M-19 guerrillas, the Irish Republican Army and anti-Turkish Armenian terrorist groups. He offered sanctuary to the three surviving members of the Black September guerrillas who slaughtered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. Gaddafi has turned Libya into a kind of Palm Springs for despots and terrorists...
...used it ruthlessly to stifle dissent abroad as well as at home. Since the late 1970s, a succession of Libyan exiles were gunned down in Europe by Gaddafi henchmen. "My people have the right to liquidate opponents inside and outside the country," he said, "even under broad daylight...
...Although Gaddafi's Green Book describes the U.S. and the Soviet Union as equally egregious imperialists, Gaddafi has made Libya into a Soviet military client, albeit one that even the Kremlin has trouble controlling. The Soviets are his principal supplier of weaponry, and he had purchased more than $12 billion worth of Soviet hardware by the early 1980s. The U.S., he says, is the "devil," the Soviets are a "friend...
...main reason for his embrace of the Soviets is U.S. support for Israel. Gaddafi is obsessed with wiping Israel off the map, and he is convinced that only America stands in his way. "Gaddafi believes that without the U.S., Israel could not continue to exist," says one Western diplomat. "He believes that the U.S. is being very unfair to the Arabs and that it is his duty as standard-bearer of the Arab cause to continually challenge Washington." Like the Ayatullah Khomeini, he sees Washington as the focus of evil on the planet and regards the U.S., not Israel...
Over the years, Gaddafi has become his own best public relations agent, a master at dropping homey personal details to Western reporters, making himself appear as a humble man of the desert. But there is a pride in his modesty and a kind of repressed cupidity in his abstinence. He regularly parades himself and primps before the female Western reporters based in Tripoli. Married to the same woman for 16 years, he has seven children, six of them boys. He has written that Islamic women are not to be kept in servitude; as if to demonstrate the point, his retinue...