A Brief History
On August 27, 1982, far away from Anatolia, Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide killed Turkish diplomat Atilla Altıkat in Ottawa, Ontario, as vengeance for the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Time and distance do not always stop those bent on revenge, and we list a few of those incidents.
Digging Deeper
In 1943, the US conducted Operation Vengeance, sending P-38 fighters 435 miles to shoot down and kill Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor raid.
From 1972 to 1973, Israel’s Mossad conducted Operation Wrath of God, revenge for the murders of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Hit squads travel to Rome, Paris, Beirut, and Norway to kill perceived Arab terrorists.
In 1988, Libyan agents placed a bomb on Pan Am flight 103 from Lockerbie, Scotland, blowing up the plane and killing 270 people in revenge for a US bombing of Libya in 1986, that raid itself being revenge for an earlier Libyan bombing of a disco in Berlin.
Question for students (and subscribers): Do you believe revenge is justified? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
If you liked this article and would like to receive notification of new articles, please feel welcome to subscribe to History and Headlines by liking us on Facebook and becoming one of our patrons!
Your readership is much appreciated!
Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Nadel, David. Pan Am 103: The Why and the How. Kindle, 2018.
Reeve, Simon. One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli Revenge Operation “Wrath of God.” Arcade, 2018.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by MB-one of a memorial to the fallen diplomats at the site of the attack on Atilla Altıkat in Ottawa, Canada, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.