> whilst your researching Robert the Bruce, he had a bit part in Mel
> Gibson's
> Scottish epic, perhaps you can spend a little time on the Stern Gang
> and
> other militant groups who bombed Arab marketplaces and murdered
> innocent
> Arabs in their agitation for a jewish homeland.
Of course I know about the Stern Gang and the other "Jewish terrorists" in the British Mandate period (actually, as far as I know, they directed more of their attention to the Brits than the Arabs, since the former were the authorities at the time). The Irgun, I think, were the ones who dealt with Arabs, as well as Brits.
However, the fact that these "terrorists" are seldom mentioned these days by mainstream media when the history of "terrorism" in the Middle East is recounted is significant. After all, the primary interest of the U.S. and Israeli governments and their allies is to establish their "monopoly of legitimate violence," and what threatens that effort most these days is what they call "terrorism" (i.e., violence committed by small, irregular groups attempting to eject U.S./Israel from the Middle East). If they remind the public that Zionists (even a minority of Zionists, though including several who later became Prime Ministers and other leaders of Israel) once used the same tactics, even though in the service of establishing the state of Israel, it would be much harder for them to argue that all "terrorism" is illegitimate.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax