Revolutionaries Review by Jason Burke – From Kidnappings to Holy War | books

nAnyone know what to call them? For some they were “sky snatchers”, for others “air bandits”. Neither name stuck, but by 1970, these figures had become fixtures on the Western political landscape. This was helped by the ease of hijacking planes. Bag checks, metal detectors, and pat-downs at airports have been proposed, but rejected as excessive.

The result was a deadly carnival of transnational terrorism that peaked in the 1970s, when the hijacking of an airplane was as much a rite of passage as a trip to Kathmandu for some counterculture types. Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in twelve languages, this collection combines Jason Burke’s flair for period detail—sideburns, aviator shades, berets, Beretta pistols—with impressive summaries of Arab and Iranian history.

Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent, writes with amusing detachment, portraying the militants as eccentrics rather than ideologues. For example, Kozo Okamoto of the Japanese Red Army was an eccentric with two obsessions: cherry blossoms and DDT. German women in the Red Army Faction mixed dialectical materialism with topless sunbathing in Amman, much to the dismay of their Palestinian hosts.

But there is a darker undercurrent. A member of a Berlin municipality likened women to horses: “One man must break them in, and then they are available to everyone.” This is how Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan Marxist who abandoned his studies at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow to join the Palestinian cause, summed up his training: “I was in the Middle East, and I learned how to kill Jews.”

If ideology sometimes recedes from these pages, it is because many of Burke’s heroes were functionally illiterate when it came to theory. What mattered was the thrill of adventure, not the utopia it was supposed to bring. This is not to say that there is not an interpretive thread running through the disparate material: Burke argues that the failure of the left left a void that Islamism quickly filled.

At the beginning of this period, the archetypal radical was Leila Khaled, the Palestinian “Grenade Girl” who hijacked a TWA plane in 1969, offering cigarettes and sweets to her captives while denouncing the United States as Israel’s armor maker. No lives were lost. Prisoners were exchanged. In the end, he became the pious jihadist, undeterred and undeterred by the prospect of piling up bodies. While the leftist kidnappers wanted propaganda for Palestine, among other reasons, the Islamic suicide bombers embraced the idea of ​​exterminating infidels.

This was not so much the Islamization of extremism as it was the Islamization of extremism. The fear that tropical communism – the revolutions in Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Sudan – would reach the capitals of the Middle East was the reason for eliminating oasis communism in its infancy. At the same time, Islamism was co-opted as a counterweight to socialism by the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, both of whom financed Islamic terrorism.

The intellectual foundation had already been laid by the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qutb, who shifted the goal from capitalism to “Westernization” and “global Judaism.” The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the climax. After the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi crushed the Iranian Communist Party in its strongholds such as Abadan, it suddenly found itself surrounded by Islamists who supported Ruhollah Khomeini, who marginalized moderate Shiite clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari. The Sunnis then carried the torch even further, ushering in the emergence of anti-Western and anti-Semitic movements, shaped more by Bin Laden than Lenin.

Palestine occupies a major place in this study. It was anger over the Nakba, the occupation, and Western support for Israel that drove much of the militancy of the period. But attempts to internationalize the struggle backfired: the kidnappings eroded Arab sympathy and led to the expulsion of Palestinians from Jordan in 1970. In the West, initial solidarity on the part of the New Left deteriorated as the bombings alienated public opinion. So did Arafat’s extremist goals and his refusal to seek a temporary settlement with Israel. In the end, he was forced to renounce revolutionary violence in order to reach a diplomatic solution, but by then it was too late.

The Soviet Union is noticeably absent in revolutionaries. It remained cautious during the period of détente and was therefore reluctant to endorse left-wing terrorism. So, ironically, it was the Islamic revolutionaries who ended up remaking the West: the fear of God was no longer the antagonism of atheist communists, but was recast as a secular bulwark against religious fundamentalism.