Word: jihadism
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Like other communiques from the shadowy Islamic Jihad, the chilling message arrived in a brown paper envelope at the offices of the Beirut newspaper An- Nahar. American Hostage William Buckley, said a long typewritten statement, had been "tried and executed" to avenge the Palestinians and Tunisians killed in the Israeli raid on Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis. Buckley, 57, was a political officer at the U.S. embassy when he was kidnaped on his way to work on March...
...community, most of them extremist and many of them revolving around a single electrifying personality. "We're not talking about neat organizations," says Helms. "These are people who are inclined to pick a title that suits them after they act." Indeed, the most famous such group, Islamic Jihad (Holy War), apparently exists solely as a disembodied and anonymous telephone identification. It has no known central leadership or defined membership; it is essentially a label or tag used by various Shi'ite terrorists to claim responsibility for many of the bombings, kidnapings and acts of random violence over the past...
...University of Beirut. A car bomb wrecks the American embassy annex in East Beirut. After each of these terrorist attacks, and many others, the phone rings in a news agency somewhere in the Middle East and an anonymous caller claims responsibility for the carnage in the name of Islamic Jihad...
Unseen, unknown, apparently unstoppable, Islamic Jihad may not even exist. It could be merely a cover name for a loose confederation of Muslim Shi'ite fanatics. Or it may be the code name for a carefully coordinated campaign by Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Iranian government has expressed sympathy for the extremists' goals but denies supplying or controlling them. U.S. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane insists otherwise. Said he last March: "There is sufficient evidence that radical Shi'ite terrorists are responsive to Iranian guidance for us to hold Iran responsible for attacks against U.S. citizens...
...Jihad means holy war, and in the Shi'ite credo, to die in a holy war is to achieve martyrdom and guarantee a place in heaven. A seemingly endless supply of young Shi'ite militants seem all too eager to earn their divine reward...