JINSA Report #598 Russia's Terrorist Road Map

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August 29, 2006

JINSA Report #598

Russia's Terrorist Road Map

Westerners, Americans in particular, often ask what we did to engender
the violent hatred of Islamic terrorists. [Not us, by the way. Well
aware of Western shortcomings and always interested in national
self-improvement, we nevertheless believe nothing we have done or are
likely to do justifies 9-11, the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem,
or the perversion of Muslim children to believe that their lives are
best spent preparing for a violent death.] Others wonder why, even
though the USSR invaded and decimated Afghanistan, the particular fury
of Islamists is directed at the U.S. and Israel.

Regnar Rasmussen, a former military interpreter and interrogation
specialist trained at the Danish Armed Forces' Specialist School, worked
as a Farsi translator in the immigration department of Danish Central
Police. In the mid-1980s, he interviewed Iranians fleeing the Islamic
Revolution and discovered that many had been communists in the time of
the Shah and received guerrilla/explosives/terrorism training in the
USSR. In an interview with Insight Magazine, Rasmussen described them:

After I had been face to face with a number of these, it dawned upon me
that the step from being a glowing red communist to becoming a
bloodthirsty Muslim fundamentalist is actually a distance equal to zero.
Since then, I have seen these two categories as the two sides of the
same coin. Communism and Islamic fundamentalism have more in common than
what meets the eye. They share the same fundamental hatred against
individualism and against individuals who wish to be happy and just
enjoy life.

Romanian Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer to
have defected from the Soviet bloc, provided details in a recent article
in the National Review.

In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against
Israel and the U.S. ... Andropov told me ...The Islamic world was a
waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of
America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought.
Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep... Terrorism and violence against Israel
and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims'
religious fervor, Andropov sermonized. We had only to keep repeating our
themes - that the United States and Israel were "fascist,
imperial-Zionist countries" bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed
with preventing the infidels' occupation of its territory."

What to do with the information? Ramussen notes:

The Soviet system had a solid tradition of registering everything. We
saw all the details meticulously noted down in every STASI report that
came out after the fall of communism in 1989. I know that all the files
of each and every single foreign student ever trained in the Soviet
Union are still intact... If the new Russia wants to show her good
intentions in the war against terror she should brush the dust off these
old archives. If you trace down each and every single graduate you will
also be able to see who in turn became his students or followers. The
entire network that was set up by that generation in those days would
become clearly visible.

It is crucial for the West to sever the relationship between terrorists
and the states that harbor and support them. A road map provided by the
Russian government would make it a lot easier.

To view this JINSA Report online click on the link below.
http://www.jinsa.org/JINSAReports/3522

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