What sleeping giant? What lesson?

On March 20, 1995, a Japanese religious cult changed the course of history - using a weapon of mass destruction in a terrorist attack. By ordering his followers to release the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway, Aum Shinriko rewrote the terrorist hand-book. Was this the sleeping giant?

Coincidentally, the rest of the world has its eyes on Iraq and its non-conventional weapons problem. In Israel, the everyone has imaginatively lived the nightmare of a missile falling nearby with nerve gas or anthrax loaded on its war-head. Yet Saddam has been explicit throughout 1998 about his lack of intention to target Israel. It would seem he is determined, however, that his bio-chemical goodies will never be possessed by the UN. Talking to TIME Magazine, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarek Aziz put it like this:"We are not in the business of terrorism...but there are people in other countries who are not satisfied with the situation about Iraq. If a military attack is waged against Iraq, that will increase the resentment against Americans, and more people would be in that mood...." The advantage being that it is difficult to retaliate against a nation when the offence was conducted by a group of address-less individuals. Short of punishing the perpetrators, the western world is without a matching answer. Could Iraqi bio-chemical weapons find its way into terrorist hands? Is this the sleeping giant?

Then there is Ossame bin Laden, the man held responsible for the bombing of the world trade center and more recently the tragic bombing of two embassies in Africa; the man who has single-handedly put huge chunks of the United States of America on red alert, and who this week thanked God for his supply of bio-chemical weapons in an interview with TIME. The alert is especially high because America has realized that Bin Laden could well be planning the kind of terrorist attack against which they are technologically quite defenseless. Emergency workers are being vaccinated against anthrax; the whole nations security personnel are being briefed, rapidly, on the tell-tale signs of a new kind of terror. Not only wired appliances are suspicious today in the US, plastic aerosols are too,indeed, everything unusual is suspicious.

America retaliated on Bin Laden in Sudan by bombing a factory in which he was reportedly manufacturing nerve gas. There was a second factory, in a residential neighborhood which the US refrained from bombing for fear of poisoning surrounding civilians if the chemicals were released. Bin Laden says he's going to target America, Britain, and part of their crime is their sponsorship of Israel, the Zionist enemy. American has invested $400 million in federal counter-terror programs alone and Clinton is wanting to up the defense budget to help the US get ready for such an attack; British customs have been briefed to suspect any unlikely-looking perfume bottles entering the country; and in Israel, the silence is deafening.

Perhaps it is because the coalition of Jews with gas is an unthinkable one in Israel. The Americans have the intellectual luxury to speculate about the range of possible terrorist threats because they are personally so much further removed. One might think that this inability to address a very real future terrorist threat in Israel is the result of the same irrationality that has governed public behavior in crisis after crisis in the Gulf (from near-riots at gas-mask distribution centers one time, to a complete lack of interest in sealing a room the next...). Indeed, most Israelis are still unaware that the gas masks they put on night after night during the 1991 Gulf War, were totally ineffective four hours after the seal was broken (on perhaps the second or third night), and that they were wearing these rubber appendages merely for psychological effect. With such a complying lack of public curiosity, who can wonder that the threat of non-conventional terrorism has never been mentioned. And so, the giant sleeps deepest in the very place he is likely to strike first.

Why worry about nerve gas being released in Dizengoff center or anthrax on an El Al plane?

It is possible that through public alertness, damage could be minimalized if not averted.

Anthrax spores (at least in the crudest form) can be produced at small personal risk in anyone's back room. They can be contained and distributed by a plastic aerosol.  No bag search will reveal anything suspicious, no metal detector or airport X-ray will sound an alert. Even if the terrorist has "I'm about to kill lots of people" written all over his face, a security guard has no mandate to detain him, and no reason to find his deodorant/asthma inhaler suspicious. In the event of a nerve gas attack in a closed crowded area, the emergency crews that arrive on the scene will be among the first casualties. We know, because they already did the full role-play in 1997 on the New York Subway, using 600 police, fire-fighters and FBI agents in response to a mock attack attack by terrorists supposedly using the deadly VX nerve gas which Iraq has in quantities and which key terrorists are known to be manufacturing.

Yet protective measures go beyond briefing, training and vaccinating the full range of Israeli emergency workers and security personnel. What Israeli has not fantasized about the day he will disarm the Arab with a knife or gun who is murdering civilians? How many casualties have been minimalized by such lay-heroes springing to disarm a terrorist? Yet when an arab starts spraying people on a bus - such heroes today would think it a practical joke, because non-conventional terrorism is still simply not part of their vocabulary.

Clinton has made it the highest research priority to speed up the research and development of technology to counter non-conventional terrorism. The same labs that were working on sensors for the battlefield are today thinking of civilian frontiers. Yet the first and most primitive hand-held bio sensor (currently being developed in conjunction with 3M) will not be available for at least two years.

Israel has plenty of brain-power and high-tech expertise, but as a result of the silence on the threat of non-conventional terror, there are no declared research projects active in Israel's universities, institutes of technology or centers for research and development. One would imagine that at Nes Ziona they are thinking on it, but the range of high-tech counter-solutions required would justify a full focussing of national high-tech expertise.

Non-conventional terrorism revolutionizes thinking on security issues. Metal detectors and x-rays are no longer effective. Many lethal viruses can be distributed through air-condition systems without a need for a terrorist to even enter the building. In the event of an anthrax attack, it could be two days (after the post-mortems of the first victims that died of flu-like symptoms) before anyone puts together the  pieces and sees that all these casualties were in Dizengoff Center at four o-clock. Medical personnel are so uninformed and unequipped that they would tell victims to go home and sleep it off. Must Israel wait for the aftermath of such an attack before it begins the long journey of developing ways to counter it?

So why is the giant of non-conventional terrorism (cited in the US as a disaster waiting to happen....) sleeping is Israel? Ely Karmon, senior researcher of the ICT (International Center of Terrorism) claims there is no Israeli published research "probably because of the general careful attitude of the Israeli academia on these subjects..." Scared of giving terrorists ideas? Thanks to their friends in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Japan, they already got ideas. Now it is high time for Israelis to get some ideas of their own, before the terrorist copy-cat phenomena spreads from Japan, through a range of reported biochemical incidents in the US, to the sunny land of Israel.

In the word of Senator Richard Lugar in 1995: "Absent a determined program of action... Americans have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear, chemical  or biological terrorism..." Is Israel a safer place?

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/7663/   For latest information on the threat of bio-chemical terrorism in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.  

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