Profiles in Terror
For those who need reminding, the late 1970s were a truly awful stretch for the United States of America: from stagflation at home to the Soviet Union and friends on the march in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America, to the Khomeini revolution in Iran. David Frum's account of the period, How We Got Here, should be required reading for anyone under 40 now complaining that Ronald Reagan's conservatism didn't amount to a hill of beans in staving off national disaster. We were, as they say, thisclose.Andrew Pessin: Tobias Gisle, We Need to Talk About the Most Influential Academic Fraud of the 20th Century
Now comes Jason Burke, a veteran journalist for the United Kingdom's Guardian, with a timely reminder that the early 1970s also stank. The Revolutionists is an extensively reported chronicle of the leading figures of the time in violent pursuit of radical change, whether communist revolutions in Europe and elsewhere or the eradication of the state of Israel. Burke makes a plausible but understated case that the terrorism problem that seized the world by the lapels on September 11, 2001, has to be understood in the context of its origins and evolution over the previous 30 years.
Burke's subtitle is "The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s." The operative word is "hijacked," not in a metaphorical sense but literally, as in smuggling guns and bombs aboard commercial airplanes, commandeering them shortly after takeoff, forcing pilots to fly to hijacker-friendly Middle East destinations, and demanding of governments the release of previously captured and incarcerated extremists plus millions in ransom. Mostly, the hostages survived, but only after being thoroughly terrorized by the hijackers' threat to blow up the airplane and its passengers, sometimes seat-belted for days in their own excrement on a blisteringly hot tarmac with little food or water, sometimes subjected as well to deranged lectures on the justice of the Palestinian cause or the class conflict leading inevitably to proletarian revolution. It is astonishing now to read of the seeming ease with which armed extremists passed themselves off as ordinary passengers through minimal security.
There were literally hundreds of such attempted hijackings, the vast majority of them successful, in the period from 1968 to 1980—that is, in the wake of the stunning Israeli victory over massed Arab armies in the 1967 Six-Day War, which landed Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem. In Burke's telling, Palestinians who cheered the onset of the war wept at its conclusion—feeling "grief equivalent to a bereavement," as he writes. One was Leila Khaled, who would go on to join George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, where she won fame as an early female perpetrator of hijackings and other terror attacks in Europe. The "armed struggle" was on.
Without making a polemic of it, Burke destroys any lingering doubt about the interconnectedness of the violent extremists of the time. Most terrorists in the Palestinian cause were homegrown, but their training camps and havens in the Middle East hosted communist radicals from West Germany, Central America, and Japan. Fusako Shigenobu, leader of the communist Japanese Red Army, became so concerned about security in her homeland she moved her base of operations to Beirut under the PFLP umbrella. The notorious "Carlos the Jackal" was born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez from Caracas, Venezuela. In the Arab world, he was known as Saleem Mohammed. His surge to global notoriety began in London in 1973 with his assassination attempt on Joseph Edward Sieff, the Jewish president of the retail chain Marks & Spencer.
The Middle East is not the only part of the world that endlessly complains about being hard done by the West, and nurses and nurtures a culture of revanchism and militarism against the mean West from inside dictatorships. This is an apt description of Russia. This is exactly Putin’s ideology. All poor Russia needs is a little more space. A little more Lebensraum for the biggest country in the world. Therefore, justice demands that it should be free to invade its neighbours at will. Most people in the West alternate between disbelief and fear at this ludicrous suggestion. Yet this is exactly what the Arab-led activism championed by Said suggests. The reasoning is equally absurd. The reason that the Arabs and Muslims have such rubbish lives is that Arab lands used to be colonized long ago and that there is that terrible humiliation of there being a tiny Jewish state covering 0.17% of “Arab lands.” Instead of laughing in disbelief, we give Said and all his acolytes the best professorships in the lands of the West. Incidentally, when Said tried to claim victimhood for the Arabs, he missed something fundamental about Israel and Zionism. Israel may have been established by desperate refugees fleeing persecution, but the secret of Israel’s success is precisely that it is not revanchist. If I would go around complaining all day that the Nasser regime stole my children’s grandfather’s house in Alexandria, all Israelis would tell me to get a life and move on. Of course, we remember the Holocaust and the persecution, but this is not the focus. We are looking to the future, not looking for revenge.Khaled Abu Toameh: Hamas Crimes No One Talks About
Orientalism theory is black and white thinking with the goal of fermenting victimhood and revanchism among Arabs and Muslims. This is reflected in Said’s political legacy, where he bravely stood against the chance at statehood for Palestinians in the 1990s so that we could have a few more decades of good ol’ war instead.
It’s high time we rid ourselves of this theory. Said and Foucault both explain nothing and do nothing for the Middle East. The entire field needs a new paradigm. The real Middle East needs theories that challenge each and every phenomenon that hurts the people who live here. Authoritarianism, oppression of women, reliance on oil, sectarianism, and of course political Islam and the other debunked, useless ideologies of the Middle East. We don’t need any more theories that blame Israel and the West for all the problems of the region. We certainly don’t need “orientalism.”
The idea is the theoretical equivalent to people insisting they are “anti-racist” while at the pro-Palestine demonstration with Hamas flags fluttering and “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud” filling the Autumn breeze.
Enough with the indulgence of this poison.
As international attention is focused on the Iran war, Hamas has stepped up its crackdown on the Palestinian people as part of its effort to reassert control in Gaza. Hamas has murdered, arrested, assaulted, or summoned for interrogation dozens of Palestinians for allegedly speaking out against the terror group.
Gaza-born political activist Hamza Howidy wrote last week: "Since the war with Iran began, Hamas's thugs have intensified their brutal, savage, barbaric campaign against Gaza's own residents. The people in this photo are just some of many who have been executed, shot, kidnapped, or brutally tortured in recent weeks. The list of atrocities grows by the day, and the sheer sadism on display goes beyond anything comprehensible.... The 'crime' those people committed? Saying their own opinions."
"What makes this even worse than the suffering of those victims itself is the silence of the people who built entire careers screaming about Palestinian suffering. The same commentators, the same 'human rights advocates,' the same influencers, and the same media outlets that spent months positioning themselves as the moral conscience of the world, packaging Palestinian pain into clout, followers, and book deals, have gone completely dark....The Palestinians left to die under Hamas's boots are apparently the wrong kind of Palestinians."
Another Gaza-born political activist, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, wrote on March 12: "Hamas terrorists conducted a parade in their trucks inside the al-Mawasi tent zone for the displaced. These gunmen are the same ones who are killing, kidnapping, torturing, and shooting Gazans every single day; they're making their presence known to say "shut up & pay us taxes"! They hide in tent areas and use civilians as shields to lessen the chance of being struck by Israeli drones and air strikes."



















