Mick Hartley

Jason Burke’s new book The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s is reviewed by Simon Sebag Montefiore in the Times. It was the decade that saw the birth of terrorism as we’ve come to know it, with the Palestine cause and its western supporters, then as now, a central feature:

The book starts in 1967 when the Israeli victory during the Six-Day War undermined the pan-Arabist nationalism of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The military failure of the Arab states empowered a new Palestinian national consciousness led by young radicals who took over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — Yasser Arafat of Fatah along with two Marxist medical doctors, George Habash and Wadie Haddad of the PFLP. They invented modern terrorism to promote the Palestinian cause in alliance with a dark but absurd cast of European and South American radicals who emerged out of the 1968 protests….

Most of the western terrorists who gravitated to the Palestinian cause were privileged sanctimonious graduates, of whom Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, founders of the Red Army Faction, were typical, flocking to train in terror camps in Lebanon, Yemen and Jordan. They were “profoundly ignorant of the society, history and culture” of the Middle East, Burke writes and he presents a hilarious picture of how many of the student radicals “picked up their keffiyeh headdress, volumes of Palestinian poetry and went home souvernir-ed and suntanned” — “for some the Palestinian cause” was “simply a stage on which a new identity could be forged”.

And so it continues to the present- the keffiyeh culture, the ignorance of Middle-Eastern history, and perhaps the secret thrill of righteously sticking it to the Jews.

The tone changed in 1979 when President Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, while in Iran the Shah fell in the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who hoodwinked an array of gullible fools. The CIA saw him as a Gandhi figure; Iranian leftists, European moderates and the BBC hailed a harmless ascetic; and the French historian Michel Foucault praised his “spiritual dimension”.

Terror now took its impetus from Islamism. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to an Islamist insurgency backed by Arab fighters, including Osama bin Laden. Islamists killed Sadat, and in Lebanon Khomeini’s minions created Hezbollah, which launched a new weapon against American and Israeli troops. Witnesses who saw Hezbollah suicide bombers drive their explosive-filled trucks into US barracks noticed that they were smiling — ghastly heralds of a new era.

But still the western leftists play along, as the initial Soviet-Marxist inspired anti-Zionism that drew them in was replaced by Islamism. In Iran, of course, once the Islamist-left alliance had overthrown the Shah and gained power, the left were quickly and brutally disposed of by their erstwhile colleagues….