No one knew what to call them.\u00a0For some they were \u201cskyjackers\u201d, for others \u201cair bandits\u201d. Neither name stuck, but by 1970, these figures were fixtures of the western political landscape. It helped that hijacking planes was easy. Bag checks, metal detectors and frisking at airports were proposed, only to be dismissed as overkill.<\/p>\n
The result was a lethal carnival of transnational terrorism that peaked in the 70s, when commandeering a plane was as much a rite of passage as backpacking to Kathmandu for some countercultural types. Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages, Jason Burke\u2019s survey of this set combines a flair for period detail \u2013 sideburns and aviator shades, berets and Beretta pistols \u2013 with impressive digests of Arab and Iranian history.<\/p>\n
Burke, the Guardian\u2019s international security correspondent, writes with amused detachment, sketching militants less as ideologues than oddballs. K\u014dz\u014d Okamoto of the Japanese Red Army, for instance, was\u00a0an eccentric with two obsessions: cherry blossom and DDT. The German women of the Red Army Faction mixed dialectical materialism with topless sunbathing in Amman, to the chagrin of their Palestinian hosts.<\/p>\n
But there is a darker undertow. A male Berlin commune member likened women to horses: \u201cOne guy has to break her in, then she\u2019s available for everyone.\u201d And this is how Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan Marxist who abandoned his studies at Moscow\u2019s Patrice Lumumba University to join the Palestinian cause, summed up his training: \u201cI\u2019ve been in the Middle East, learning how to kill Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n
If ideology sometimes recedes from these pages, it is because many of Burke\u2019s antiheroes were functionally illiterate when it came to theory. What counted was the excitement of the escapade, not the utopia it was meant to bring about. That doesn\u2019t mean there isn\u2019t an interpretative thread running through the disparate material: the failure of the left, Burke argues, left a vacuum that was swiftly filled by Islamism.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of the period, the\u00a0prototypical radical was Leila Khaled, the Palestinian \u201cGrenade Girl\u201d who hijacked a TWA flight in 1969, offering cigarettes and sweets to her captives while denouncing the US as Israel\u2019s armourer. No lives were lost; prisoners were exchanged. By the end, it had become the pious jihadi, unbending and undeterred by the prospect of bodies piling up. Where leftist hijackers wanted publicity for Palestine, among other causes, Islamist suicide bombers embraced the annihilation of infidels.<\/p>\n
This was less the radicalisation of\u00a0Islam than it was the Islamisation of\u00a0radicalism. The fear that tropical communism \u2013 revolutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, Ethiopia and Sudan \u2013 struck into Middle Eastern capitals ensured that oasis communism was\u00a0nipped in the bud. Islamism, meanwhile, was accommodated as a\u00a0counterweight to socialism by the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, both of whom bankrolled Islamist terror.<\/p>\n
The intellectual groundwork had already been laid by the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qutb, who shifted\u00a0the target from capitalism to\u00a0\u201cwesternisation\u201d and \u201cworld Jewry\u201d. The 1979 Iranian Revolution represented a climax. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi\u2019s regime, having crushed\u00a0the Iranian communist party\u00a0in strongholds such as Abadan, suddenly found itself outflanked by Islamists rallying to Ruhollah Khomeini, who\u00a0sidelined moderate Shia clerics such\u00a0as\u00a0the grand ayatollah\u00a0Kazem Shariatmadari. Sunnis subsequently carried the\u00a0torch further, ushering in anti-western, antisemitic movements shaped more\u00a0by Bin Laden than Lenin.<\/p>\n
Palestine looms large in this study. It was outrage over the Nakba, occupation and western backing of Israel that drove much of the militancy of the period. But attempts to internationalise the struggle backfired: the hijackings eroded Arab sympathy and led to the expulsion of Palestinians from Jordan in 1970. In the west, initial solidarity from the New Left soured as bombings alienated opinion. So, too, did Arafat\u2019s maximalist aims and refusal to seek a\u00a0modus vivendi with Israel; in the end, he was forced to renounce revolutionary violence for a diplomatic solution, but by then it was too late.<\/p>\n
The Soviet Union is noticeably absent in The Revolutionists. It remained cautious during d\u00e9tente and therefore reluctant to endorse leftwing terrorism. So, ironically, it was Islamist revolutionaries who ended up reshaping the west: no longer the god-fearing foil to godless communists, it was recast as the secular bulwark against religious fundamentalism.<\/p>\n