The FBI team investigating the killings by an Egyptian immigrant, Hesham Muhammad Hadayet prefers to define the shooting as a hate or rage crime.
From Israel’s point of view, however, the fact that Hadayet — who was armed with two handguns, spare ammunition, and a six-inch knife — had sought out the El Al counter was a clear indication of his motives.
“On the face of things, it was no coincidence that he picked out the El Al counter and opened fire indiscriminately at the passengers and staff there,” said Ganor. “This indicates that the attack was politically motivated and that puts it into the category of a terrorist act, despite what appears to be American effort to calm things down by defining it as a hate crime.
“I would dare to say that if a lone gunman had opened fire, for instance, at the Continental Airways counter at Cairo airport in order to deliberately kill Americans, it would not be described as a hate crime but, quite rightly, as a terrorist act.
“In my opinion, contrary to the premise in criminal cases in which a suspect is innocent until proven guilty, any politically motivated crime committed against civilians because of their ethnic or national identity should automatically be defined as a terrorist act unless proven otherwise.”
Ganor maintained that failure to define attacks like the one at the Los Angeles airport as acts of terror could also prove detrimental to the cause of fighting terrorism.
He noted that it was more than two years after the assassination in the U.S. of Kach leader Rabbi Meir Kahane that it was discovered that the man jailed for the killing, Said Noseir, had been connected to the cell responsible for the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in New York.
Ganor argued that if the Kahane killing had been treated from the outset as a terror attack, the investigation would have been more thorough and, as a result, would have revealed the link which might have helped the authorities thwart the bombing in which six people were killed and hundreds wounded.
“Only after the arrest of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the ringleader of the cell responsible for the 1993 attack, and other members, was it decided to conduct another search at the home of Nosier,” he said.
“The investigators removed from Noseir’s home a lot of material, some of it in Arabic which was not translated after the Kahane assassination, that revealed the link and also the plans for the World Trade Center attack.
“The plan of the cell, headed by Rahman, had been to detonate the car bomb in the underground parking lot in such a way that it would cause that part of the twin towers to collapse on the other and demolish them both.
“Rahman’s followers had also planned to blow up the U.N. building in Manhattan and plant explosives in New Jersey Fire Department fire trucks which were due to have been detonated when the vehicles were crossing the bridges or in the tunnels en route to reinforce the Manhattan fire department.
“It is more than conceivable that the 1993 bombing would have been averted if the Kahane assassination had been treated as a terrorist act and not as an isolated case by a lone gunman.
“This is why definition of a crime is, in my opinion, an extremely crucial issue and not just a theoretical linguistic debate.
This takes on even more significance given the potential consequences following the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.