Terrible news from Bulgaria, as “An explosion on bus carrying Israeli tourists at the airport of the Black Sea city of Burgas killed up to seven people” today.
An Israeli witness told Army Radio he believed the attack was caused by a suicide bomber. Haaretz reported that an Israeli who witnessed the event said that one of the buses that carried Israelis across terminals in the airport blew up and went up in flames.
Bulgarian national radio said many people were injured in the blast. Burgas airport was closed after the incident and flights were redirected to the airport of Varna, police said.
Israeli officials had previously said that Bulgaria, a popular holiday destination for Israeli tourists, was vulnerable to attack by Islamist militants who could infiltrate via nearby Turkey.
The attack came on the 18th anniversary of the fatal bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds.
I don’t care how many crimes and policy misjudgments the government of Israel is guilty of. This is the wrong response both morally and tactically. It makes imperialism and settlerism stronger, not weaker. Attacks like these are engineered by powerful people who use the powerless as pawns; fascism is fascism whether Islamic, Christian or otherwise.
Leon Trotsky’s “The Bankruptcy of Individual Terrorism” accurately describes the social location of terrorism as a tactic, as well as its political backwardness:
Everything that is outside the framework of terror is only the setting for the struggle; at best, an auxiliary means. In the blinding flash of exploding bombs, the contours of political parties and the dividing lines of the class struggle disappear without a trace. . . .
Engendered by the absence of a revolutionary class, regenerated later by a lack of confidence in the revolutionary masses, terrorism can maintain itself only by exploiting the weakness and disorganisation of the masses, minimising their conquests, and exaggerating their defeats.
There is a better way.
