portrait of a terrorist an interview with kozo okamoto

ON MAY 30, 1972, three Japanese students assaulted a crowded Israeli airport with sub-machine guns and hand grenades, killing twenty-six unarmed persons and wounding nearly eighty more. The attack was sponsored jointly by the Red Army Faction, a radical Japanese group, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an Arab guerrilla organization. More than any other recent example, the Lod Airport massacre revealed the global scale of contemporary terrorism. This applies not only to the international cast of characters, but more fundamentally to the ideology which inspired the incident. The surviving member of the Japanese attack squad, Kozo Okamoto, told me that his opportunity to become a guerrilla happened to come through the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), but it might just as easily have been another group in another country. While he was personally concerned about the state of the Palestinian refugees, he said that was definitely not his motivation for entering guerrilla training He was moved by a much more global desire to participate in world revolution.