In May, 1974, I made a trip to Belgium to help with some military work that was going on there. We landed at Antwerp's airport and taxied into the terminal. We noted among ourselves that there were armored vehicles on the runway and several special forces were walking around with sub-machine guns. We were not used to that, because in those days, there were no checkpoints at airports and TSA did not exist.
What we did see there was indicative of a group of domestic terrorists who were hijacking airplanes and killing innocent people on trains and in bombing attacks. They weren't Muslims and they weren't fighting in the Middle East. I was in training for hostage negotiation, and we found them difficult people to talk to because they didn't speak English and they were not in a negotiating mood anytime we ever saw them stick their heads up. These days, we wouldn't have been doing hostage negotiation with any of them, but they haven't changed much.
We can put a Muslim face on terrorism, but from what I saw then it was more about character than religion. These are people who think anyone who disagrees with them should die rather than be persuaded. We learned the same about them. The police could not convince them that the hostages should be allowed to live in exchange for a small piece of humanity the hostage takers were clearly lacking. The only way to free the hostages was the kill the folks taking them. Some people may not like where that takes us, but we learned those lessons the hard way.
No comments:
Post a Comment