--- Begin Message --- http://www.megastories.com/mideast/glossary/stern.htm
The Stern Gang
One Israeli diplomat who grew up in the tough East End of London and rose to some prominence in the Israeli diplomatic service used to wear a Stern Gang badge inside his lapel when he was a boy. He found it was a useful thing to flash at any anti-Semitic roughs that might be giving him trouble - and apparently it worked.
In post-war British-mandated Palestine the words Stern Gang equalled "terrorism" - assassinations, bombings, the full works. Even after independence, mainstream Jews continued to regard these Jewish terrorists as an extremist and ultimately insignificant aberration in the Zionist movement ... until that is it was revealed that the Likud foreign minister of the 1970s, Yitzhak Shamir, had been the gang's operations commander.
Avraham Stern formed his Fighters for the Freedom of Israel movement during World War II. A member of the so-called Revisionist wing of Zionism, he rejected any compromises with the British and demanded the creation of a Greater Israel that would occupy all the Jewish territories of the Bible.
He regarded Britain as a bigger enemy than Hitler and opposed Jews joining up in the British army to fight Nazism.
Stern even got a message to the Nazis in which he said his movement was "well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans", and added: "Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people."
By appointing Shamir Foreign Minister, Prime Minister Menachem Begin had selected the organiser of two famous assassinations: the killing of Lord Moyne, the British Minister representative in the Middle East, in 1944, and that of Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN's special Mediator on Palestine, in 1948. Shamir later went on to become prime minister.
Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan once famously, and wrongly said, that there was no word in Russian for 'peace'. But there is an interesting linguistic twist in Hebrew that neatly captures the dichotomy of a nation which achieved statehood partly through armed action, and then has found itself attacked by the same means.
The word used today in Hebrew to describe a terrorist is 'mekhabbel'. It is used liberally to describe anyone who fights the state with political violence.
It is in fact, exactly the same word that Yitzhak Shamir and his clleagues used to describe themselves - with pride - in their armed guerrilla struggle against the British. In those days it was roughly translated as 'saboteur', although the Stern Gang did a lot more than mere sabotage.
The meaning [of the word] changed from positive 'saboteur' to extremely negative 'terrorist' in the early days of the Israeli state - once the battle for independence had been won and what had been won had to be protected from others seeking to take it away by the same means.
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