Conveniently forgotten acts of terrorism

Dr. Thomas B. Irving

Cedar Rapids Gazette July 8, 1988

Another dull report from Washington about terrorism came in the mail the other day.
What disturbed me about this is that no investigator seemed to take its history back were fairly
recent immense, where the terrorist are Arabs or Iranians.
In July 1948, my office-mate Don Eldelberto Torres, a Nicaraguan professor who was
registrar in the Faculty of Arts (or Humanities), was flying to Costa Rica after José figure as
triumph in the Civil War of that year. Don Eldelberto and I shared an arts college office of the
University of San Carlos in Guatemala.
They flushed out the cell at six every morning with a fire hose into an open skylight high
in the wall, and without removing the prisoner from his cell. The result left Don Eldelberto with
incurable sinus trouble.
The two days following the hijacking or some of the most difficult ever face. When the
San Carlo students smash Pan-American’s office and Sixth Avenue in Guatemala City and
roamed the streets and university corridors, seeking redress for this outrage. When Iranian or
Korean students demonstrate, remember this episode.
American students attending the summer school that I directed were asked which side
they stood on. An American cultural attaché present at the hastily called meeting naturally
wanted them to support Pan-American, an impossible standard view of the Guatemalan feeling at
the time. I stood in the middle.
Eventually, the Pan-American commissary in Guatemala prepared meals for Central
American runs was sold over the company’s head to satisfy the action that Don Alberto brought
against Pan Am.
This event marked the beginning of the airline’s end in Latin America, when it lost the
confidence of the traveling public, who were larger Latin Americans, many of them politicians.
Guinea and some other countries in West Africa however saw similar incidents on their Pan-
American runs later on, where the politicians ran the risk of being delivered by the courtesy of
Pan-American are wise to the steps or airports of their mortal riots.
Eight years later, in October 1956, the future prime minister of Algeria, who had been but
Allah, became this disease next victim that I know of, bearing the West African episodes of Pan-
American. This Algerian patriot was flying for several companions on Air Maroc, the Moroccan
national airlines, from Morocco to a conference in Tunis. Their aircraft was intercepted by the
French Air Force escorted to a milestone lounge airport in Algiers the same feel with the recent
Kuwaiti hijackings also landed. Them God and his friends spend the next five years of French
military prison, almost to the end of the Algerian war of Independence.
Then Adolph Eichmann was hijacked from Buenos Aires in 1960, picked up on the
subterranean street by bully boys, and flown to the occupied Palestine, where he was giving a
kangaroo trial and hanged. Lord Moyne in Cairo and count murder though it in Jerusalem were
assassinated by the same shadowy authority, without counting ugly massacres by terrorists like
King David Hotel, the school children of Saqiat Sidi Yusuf in Tunisia or the peasants of Dayr
Yasin.
 The 18 month old brother an 80-year-old grandmother a friend of mine were just shove it
down a well to die by men who have since been received in the White House. Some acts of
terrorism apparently do not count, are wiped out by this Washington computer.
This summary gives us the early history of the general act of hijacking and terrorism for
political purposes. These instances are generally left out of the record. We ignore them at our
peril because this prevents us from finding a real cure for the disease.
In only one case were Arabs involved, that of Ben Bella, and he was not the author but
the victim of a crime. Nevertheless, the Middle Easterners learned how to use the method, and
today emphasis has changed.
Why do our histories and studies of this phenomenon of terrorism fail to mention the
King David Hotel, the Dayr Yasin massacre, the Lott affair in Cairo, Sabra and Shatila in
Lebanon? The perpetrators of these killings have never been cited before in a court law, when
they should have been sent to Nuremberg to stand trial for these crimes against humanity.
German reparations to the Zionists should be honestly diverted from the Jewish state to
the latter's victims, the Palestinians. Violence is a two-edged weapon, and when we ignore its
implications, we therefore condemn ourselves to seeing it used under other circumstances do we
do not control. Researchers in Washington should be more the role or reporter or the reports will
become propaganda. Don Eldelberto still lives, retired in his 90s to Costa Rica, now his home.
Someday soon I like to talk to talk these matters over with him before it is too late. His initial
hijacking has become a phenomenon over time.