Last Friday marked the 37th anniversary of a Palestinian terrorist group’s attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris, which left six dead and injured twenty more. Yves Bonnet, the French intelligence chief at the time, recently admitted that he made a deal with the perpetrators—an offshoot of Fatah known as the Abu Nidal group—guaranteeing that they could come and go as they please in France, so long as they did not carry out any further attacks within the country’s borders. In Bonnet’s words:
[I]t worked. There were no further attacks between the end of 1983 and the end of 1985. . . . Afterward, they carried out attacks in Italy, for example, but that did not concern me so long as there was nothing on French soil.
Jay Nordlinger comments:
In 1985, Palestinian terrorists hijacked the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship. They singled out one passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, for murder. He was an American. But more important to the terrorists: he was a Jew.
He was traveling with his wife, Marilyn, in celebration of their 36th wedding anniversary. They had several friends with them. Klinghoffer was sixty-nine-years-old and confined to a wheelchair. The terrorists shot him and dumped him overboard.
We captured them, we Americans did. We captured the terrorists—some of them—who then spent time in Italian jail cells. After a while . . . poof. They walked. The Italians had their own [version of Bonnet’s realism].
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-summer-of-82-etc/