ñSince the late 1960s, many groups have adopted terrorist tactics to destabilize society and achieve political ends.ñ
Terrorism emerged as an international phenomenon at the end of the 1960s. Its main focus was the Middle East. Palestinians dedicated to the overthrow the state of Israel began to stage spectacular attacks, chiefly on Israeli targets abroad or those associated with the United States, Israel's main supporter. Palestinian terrorists and their allies hijacked and blew up airliners, took hostages - including on one occasion all the oil ministers of the main Arab states - and carried out massacres at airports. From 1979, the victory of a militant version of the Islamic Shi'ite faith in Iran led to terrorist attacks by Shi'ites, often against American targets - the Shi'ite leaders denounced the United States as "the Great Satan".
In Europe, terrorist movements developed at the same time. Some were set up by student revolutionaries and intellectuals disappointed by the failure of the largely peaceful student-led revolt of 1968 to achieve significant political change. The Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang (or Red Army Faction) in Germany were the main examples of these post-1968 terrorist movements. They carried out many kidnappings and assassinations in the 1970s, but their influence then faded. More durable terrorist organizations in Europe were based on nationalism. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), in Northern Ireland and the ETA movement in the Basque country of northern Spain both found enough support for their terrorist campaigns among the local population to continue their activities into the 1990s. Terrorist acts have also been committed by purely criminal organizations. The Mafia has been responsible for numerous atrocities in Italy, particularly on the island of Sicily. The United States experienced the growth of its own terrorist groups in the 1990s, as right-wing extremists took on the federal government. Worldwide terrorism has led to widespread adoption of strict security measures, especially at airports.┴
