Abu Nidal

Sabri Khalil al-Banna

8/6/2007

Abu Nidal, who was born Sabri Khalil al-Banna, was the founder of Fatah-the Revolutionary Council. Transliterated from the Arabic, his Fatah al-Majles al-Thawy became known to the world as the Abu Nidal Group. This terrorist who would become a mercenary, was born to a wealthy merchant who owned 6,000 acres of orange groves south of Jaffa, near today's Ashkelon in Israel. His father Muhammad Hajj Khalil al-Banna, was the richest man in the British Mandate of Palestine. His money allowed him to have 13 wives who bore him 16 sons and 8 daughters. And in this regard, Muhammad al-Banna was very similar to Muhammad bin Laden - Osama's wealthy father.

Abu Nidal's mother had been one of Muhammad al-Banna's maids, an Alawait girl who was just 15 when she was impregnated. Scorned by his brothers as a result, Abu Nidal was sent off to school - the College des Freres, a French Roman Catholic academy. Their records show that Abu Nidal finished the first grade. However, when Muhammad Hajj Khalil al-Banna died in 1945, the maid who had been Sabri Khalil's mother was kicked out of the house. At age seven, the future terrorist came under the custody of his brothers, who were all devout Muslims. They enrolled Sabri Khalil in the al-Umaria Islamic school in Jerusalem. There, he was able to successfully complete grades two and three.

The man we know today as Abu Nidal, first tasted blood on November 29th, 1947, when Arab Muslims rejected the United Nations partition plan which effectively established the state of Israel. Muslims rose up against Jews and militias tangled all over the Promised Land. As a result, Abu Nidal and his brothers fled to Gaza, then under the control of Egypt. Next, the clan moved to Nablus in the West Bank, which was at the time part of Jordan.

It was under the tutelage of the Jordanians that the future "Father of Jihad" finished grammar school. The student who was considered "not very bright" was said to have graduated from a Jordanian high school in 1955. With these credentials, he was allowed to study engineering at Cairo University, but he dropped out and returned to Nablus without a degree. But that does not mean that the aspiring jihadist left CU empty handed. It is virtually certain that the Abu Nidal would have been influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood while attending school in Cairo.

Back in Nablus, Abu Nidal joined the Ba'ath Party when he was 18, but being a dictator, King Hussein of Jordan closed the party down in 1957. It was then that the wannabe terrorist migrated to the land where Islamic jihad had begun - Saudi Arabia. While working for Aramco in the crude Saudi fiefdom, Nidal helped found the Palestine Secret Organization. Not so secret, Aramco found out and fired him. And since Aramco was a joint venture between American industrialists and the Saud warlords, the OPECers, following his dismissal in the mid 60s, imprisoned, tortured, and then expelled their Palestinian guest.

In 1967, Abu Nidal returned to Nablus and joined Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO. That timing was not good either however, because it was coterminous with Israel's lopsided victory during the Six Day War. On the road again, AN moved to Amman, Jordan where he joined the Fatah underground known as the Fedayeen. It was then that he chose the nom de guerre, Abu Nidal, meaning "father of the struggle.".

Fatah's second in command, Abu Iyad, appointed Abu Nidal as their representative in Khartoum, Sudan in 1968. At the time, the Islamic Sudanese regime was commencing its slaughter of what would be 2.7 million African Christians and Animists. As such, it was the perfect post for the future psychopath.

Having been inspired by the Arab Muslim brutality and barbarism in the Sudan, two months before Black September 1970, the Father of Jihad was sent to Baghdad, Iraq where he was safe from King Hussein's annihilation of 10,000 Palestinians in just 10 days. But that made the Fedayeen fighter look like a coward - like someone who would send others out to do his bidding. (Kind of like an Islamic Imam with a suicide bomber.).

Looking to redeem his tattered reputation, Abu Nidal sought to be included in Black September, the PLO Fedayeen group that Yasser Arafat and Fatah were using as a cover to implement their most violent international crimes. Spurned by the really good terrorists, Nidal used the Voice of Palestine, the PLO-owned radio station in Iraq, to criticize Arafat and the PLO, saying that they were cowards.

But all of this hate-filled rhetoric must have endeared AN to his PLO colleagues because at Fatah's Third Congress in Damascus in 1971, Abu Nidal joined forces with Abu Daoud, one of Fatah's most ruthless commanders, and the mastermind behind Black September's terrorist raid on Jews at the Munich Olympic Games.

Having moved up in the ranks of Islamic terror, and having made all the right contacts, on September 5th, 1973, the Father of Jihad undertook his first operation. Five Muslim gunmen using the name Al-Iqab (The Punishment) seized the Saudi Embassy in Paris, taking 11 hostages and threatening to kill them if Abu Dawud was not released from jail in Jordan. (Dawud was being held for an assassination attempt on King Hussein.) After a three-day siege and the intervention of the PLO, the gunmen surrendered, though not before the Kuwaiti government had agreed to pay King Hussein $12 million in exchange for Abu Dawud. This insight was provided during an interview Dawud himself gave to the author of Abu Nidal's biography, Patrick Seale.

Neither Abu Nidal nor the Punishment Squad were credited with this attack because the media blamed Fatah's Black September. Yet Abu Iyad, Arafat's deputy, who acted as the liaison between Fatah and the BSO, had not authorized the mission. In fact, Abu Iyad and Mahmoud Abbas, the future "moderate" President of the Palestinian Authority, flew to Baghdad to confront Nidal. They recognized that while Dawud was a fellow jihadist and member of their team, and while Jordan was a foe, without the generous support of the Kuwaiti OPECers, Fatah, the PLO and BSO wouldn't have the wherewithal to continue their assault on Christians and Jews - especially Americans and Israelis. Angered by the affront, Abu Nidal severed his relationships with the PLO and became a mercenary.

And so it was that in the immediate aftermath of Islam losing the Yom Kippur War in October 1993, that Abu Nidal was hired to hijack a KLM airliner using the fictitious name: Arab Nationalist Youth Organization. Well, at least the ANO was a young organization at the time. The move was designed to thwart Arafat's political ambitions following Islam's defeat. For having the audacity to challenge the Ugly One, Arafat expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah in March 1974.

The excommunicated terrorist formed his own Fedayeen gang called Black June, after the timing of Syria's support for the Christians battling PLO Muslim militias in Lebanon. But when the Father of Jihad moved his new club from Baghdad to Syria, he thought better of it and deployed the Fatah - Revolutionary Council moniker.

During the height of his influence in the mid to late 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal became known to the Islamic world by the name he had chosen for himself: the "Father of Jihad." In an interview with Der Spiegel in 1985, the Muslim mass murderer said: "I am the evil spirit of the secret services. I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing them nightmares." The confession was true enough, as all good Muslims are in league with Satan, but it was so general it could be said of any Islamic terrorist.

Abu Nidal, himself, claims that he split with Yasser Arafat's al-Fatah and PLO as a result their June 8th, 1974 enactment of the "Phased Plan," which called for the establishment of a Palestinian state on any territory evacuated by Israel. The scheme was designed so that Israelis would be forced to flee their homes as a result of PLO-sponsored terrorism, and that once gone, their land would be deployed as a staging area for destroying the remainder of the Jewish state. While that plan was as sound as it was evil, and while that playbook is the one being implemented in Israel today by the Bush Administration and by Palestinian terrorists, Abu Nidal was an impatient thug and wanted noting to do with it.

As an independent contractor, Abu Nidal was set up as a terrorist for hire. Based over the years in Syria, Libya, Egypt, and Iraq, he found plenty of Muslims willing to finance his anti-Semitic and anti-American enterprise. It is estimated the Abu Nidal was responsible for killing over 1,000 Christians and Jews in twenty countries.

He came within a whisker of taking my life because I was scheduled to fly on TWA flight 841, the first plane sent to the bottom of the sea by an Abu Nidal bomb. His Muslim killing business was so immature in September 1974, that when they murdered 88 Christians and Jews aboard the TWA flight from Athens to Rome, the Abu Nidal Group wasn't given credit, even though their press release admitted responsibility. While the subsequent investigations confirmed that Abu Nidal was complicit in the crime, at that time the Arabic names Sabri Khalil al-Banna and Fatah al-Majles al-Thawy meant nothing to the victims, to their politicians, or to the media.

Therefore, the Abu Nidal Organization's coming out party occurred on December 27th, 1985 when his Islamic jihadists attacked the El Al ticket counters at the Rome and Vienna airports. It turns out that Nidal had ripped a page from Hasan's Hashshashin Fedayeen playbook and doped his assassins up on amphetamines before they opened fire on the passengers, murdering 18 and mutilating 120 more.

Nidal may have also been a student of Adam Weishaupt, the founder of modern day Fascism, Communism, and the religion of man, Secular Humanism. Each new fedayeen recruit was given several days to write out his entire life story by hand, including names and addresses of family members, friends, and lovers, then was required to sign a paper saying he agreed to be executed if anything was found to be untrue. As evidence he meant business, Nidal was known to torture jihadists who got out of line.

In the late 1980s, the source of Abu Nidal's funding became the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI. And that is a tale of intrigue that includes George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Khalid bin Mahfouz, the bin Ladens including Osama, the Saudi Arabian ruling family, and the government of Pakistan. It is detailed in the September 3rd, 1967 Islamic Terror Timeline entry detailing the fallout from Muhammad bin Laden's death. While we won't revisit those financial ties here, suffice it to say that the Abu Nidal Group had no difficulty getting Islamic, German, British, and American companies to sell them the weapons of terror.

Abu Nidal's other benefactor was the syphilis-ridden, OPECing Muslim, Colonel Qadhafi of Libya. Muammar and Abu became best friends. It is why Qadhafi chose Nidal to execute his vengeance against America after the April 15th, 1986 strike by U.S. warplanes left Hannad Qadhafi, the dictator's baby daughter, dead. The ANG bombed a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. troops. Then they schemed together to blow up American aircraft, beginning with the September 5th, 1986 hijacking of Pan Am flight 73 out of Karachi, Pakistan in which 22 passengers were murdered. That led to a failed attempt on a flight emanating from Belgrade. This failure motivated Nidal's ANG and Qadhafi's Libyan Intelligence Service to collaborate on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. On December 21st, 1988, it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland when a bomb was detonated in the forward cargo hold, killing all 259 passengers and crew as well as 11 people on the ground. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the former head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines was not only commissioned with the task by Qadhafi and Nidal, he was convicted for the crime.

The ANG's last known assault was the 1991 assassination of Abu Iyad, the deputy chief of the PLO who had called his former associate "the father of chaos." Issam Sartawi, a Palestinian physician, called Nidal a "psychopath whose world was comprised of plots and counterplots," an accusation that reads like the Qur'an.

In the fall of his career, Abu Nidal was known to have entered Iraq in 1999 after being expelled from Libya by Qadhafi, who was trying to distance himself from known terrorists because it was cutting into his OPEC-derived income. For a while Saddam Hussein must have found the retired terrorist entertaining because Nidal was allowed to live in a mansion owned by the Mukhabarat, Iraq's secret police.

On August 21, 2002, Iraq's chief of intelligence, Taher Jalil Habbush, held a press conference and handed out pictures of Abu Nidal's bloodied body, along with a coroner's report that said that he had died from a single gunshot wound to the mouth which had exited his skull. Habbush told the assembled that his agents had arrived at the house to arrest Nidal on suspicion of him conspiring with the Kuwaiti Emirs and Saud warlords to assassinate Saddam Hussein and bring down his Ba'ath government. When they arrived, they allowed Nidal to go into his bedroom to change his clothes at which time he was said to have shot himself.

Palestinian sources say that Saddam Hussein ordered the assassination of the Islamic terrorist because he was the only internationally known jihadist living in Iraq before America's invasion. They claimed that the Palestinian's body was riddled with bullets in an assault perpetrated by some 30 Mukhabarat agents. Knowing that their former comrade was a mercenary and traitor, they said that Saddam would have seen Abu Nidal as a threat - as an assassin willing to sell his deadly services to the highest bidder.

Of his death, the British Guardian wrote: "He was a patriot turned psychopath. His warped personal drives pushed him into hideous crimes. He became the ultimate mercenary." They got everything right except the reason his personality had been warped, turning him into a psychotic mercenary who committed hideous crimes. Abu Nidal was a Muslim.