page_title: History of terrorism
section_title: Middle East
hierarchical_section_title: History of terrorism / Communism, Nationalism, Anti-colonial struggles and Cold War proxies / Middle East
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Die Gedenktafel an der Connollystraße 31 im Olympischen Dorf in München im Juni 2012. English: Plaque in front of the Israeli athletes' quarters commemorating the victims of the Munich massacre. The inscription, in German and en:Hebrew, reads: The team of the State of Israel lived in this building during the 20th Olympic Summer Games from 21 August to 5 September 1972. On 5 September, [list of victims] died a violent death. Honor to their memory.
context_page_description: The history of terrorism is a history of well-known and historically significant individuals, entities, and incidents associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with terrorism. Scholars agree that terrorism is a disputed term, and very few of those labeled terrorists describe themselves as such. It is common for opponents in a violent conflict to describe the other side as terrorists or as practicing terrorism.
  Depending on how broadly the term is defined, the roots and practice of terrorism can be traced at least to the 1st-century AD Sicarii Zealots, though some dispute whether the group, which assassinated collaborators with Roman rule in the province of Judea, was in fact terrorist. The first use in English of the term 'terrorism' occurred during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, when the Jacobins, who ruled the revolutionary state, employed violence, including mass executions by guillotine, to compel obedience to the state and intimidate regime enemies. The association of the term only with state violence and intimidation lasted until the mid-19th century, when it began to be associated with non-governmental groups.
context_section_description: Founded in 1928 as a nationalist social-welfare and political movement in British-controlled Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood began to attack British soldiers and police stations in the late 1940s. Founded and led by Hassan al-Banna, it also assassinated politicians seen as collaborating with British rule, most prominently Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi in 1948. In 1952 a military coup overthrew British rule, and shortly thereafter the Muslim Brotherhood went underground in the face of a massive crackdown. Though sometimes banned or otherwise oppressed, the group continues to exist in present-day Egypt.
  The National Liberation Front (FLN) was a nationalist group founded in French-controlled Algeria in 1954. The group became a large-scale resistance movement against French rule, with terrorism only part of its operations. The FLN leadership took inspiration from the Viet Minh rebels who had made French troops withdraw from Vietnam. The FLN was one of the first anti-colonial groups to use large-scale compliance violence. The FLN would establish control over a rural village and coerce its peasants to execute any French loyalists among them. On the night of October 31, 1954, in a coordinated wave of seventy bombings and shootings known as the Toussaint attacks, the FLN attacked French military installations and the homes of Algerian loyalists. In the following year, the group gained significant support for an uprising against loyalists in Philippeville. This uprising, and the heavy-handed response by the French, convinced many Algerians to support the FLN and the independence movement. The FLN eventually secured Algerian independence from France in 1962, and transformed itself into Algeria's ruling party.
  Fatah was organized as a Palestinian nationalist group in 1954, and exists today as a political party in Palestine. In 1967 it joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an umbrella organization for secular Palestinian nationalist groups formed in 1964. The PLO began its own armed operations in 1965. The PLO's membership comprises separate and possibly contending paramilitary and political factions, the largest of which include Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Factions of the PLO have advocated or carried out acts of terrorism. Abu Iyad organized the Fatah splinter group Black September in 1970; the group is arguably best known for seizing eleven Israeli athletes as hostages at the September 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. All the athletes and five Black September operatives died during a gun battle with the West German police in what later became known as the Munich massacre. The PFLP, founded in 1967 by George Habash, on September 6, 1970 hijacked three international passenger planes, landing two of them in Jordan and blowing up the third. Fatah leader and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat publicly renounced terrorism in December 1988 on behalf of the PLO, but Israel has stated that it has proof that Arafat continued to sponsor terrorism until his death in 2004.
  In the 1974 Ma'alot massacre 22 Israeli high-school students, aged 14 to 16 from Safed were killed by three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Before reaching the school, the trio shot and killed two Arab women, a Jewish man, his pregnant wife, and their 4-year-old son, and wounded several others.
  The People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) or Mujahedin-e Khalq (founded in 1965), is a socialist Islamic group that has fought Iran's government since the Khomeini revolution. The group originated to oppose capitalism and what it perceived as western exploitation of Iran under  the Shah. The group would go on to play an important role in the Shah's overthrow but was unable to capitalize on this in the following power-vacuum. The group is suspected of having a membership of between 10,000 and 30,000. The group renounced violence in 2001 but remains a proscribed terror-organization in Iran and in the United States. The EU, however, has removed the gro
caption: Plaque commemorating the eleven Israeli athletes killed during the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
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