Abu Daoud

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Mohammad Oudeh (Arabic: محمد عودة), commonly known as Abu Daoud (Arabic: أبو داود), was the leader of the Black September, the Palestine Liberation Organisation splinter group that carried out the 1972 Munich massacre. Many of its members were killed in Israel's campaign Operation Wrath of God, although Daoud was never assassinated. In 1981, Daoud claimed that the Mossad tried to assassinate him while in Poland, although it is not clear who was behind the attempt. In 1996 he was permitted to travel through Israel to attend a PLO meeting in the Gaza Strip. During that meeting, Daoud voted in favor of the resolution to rescind the section of the PLO's charter calling for the destruction of Israel.

Daoud published an autobiography Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich in French in 1999, which was later published as Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist in English. For the work he was awarded the Palestine Prize for Culture in 1999, a 10,000 franc prize. As of December 2005 Daoud is 68 and lives in Damascus, Syria; his wife lives in Amman.

[edit] Quotations

"We did not target Israeli civilians. Some of them [the Israeli athletes] had taken part in wars and killed many Palestinians,” he said. “Whether a pianist or an athlete, any Israeli is a soldier."
"When I chose a long time ago to be a revolutionary fighter I prepared to be a martyr,"
"I am not afraid, because people’s souls are in God’s hands, not Israel’s."
"If he [Spielberg] really wanted to make it a prayer for peace he should have listened to both sides of the story and reflected reality, rather than serving the Zionist side alone."
"I would be against any operation like Munich ever again. At the time, it was the correct thing to do for our cause. ... The operation brought the Palestinian issue into the homes of 500 million people who never previously cared about Palestinian victims at the hands of the Israelis"