Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [101]
At the age of twenty-five, Salameh had walked into the PLO’s Amman offices during the 1967 Six-Day Arab war with Israel. This was a victory of family sentiment. Salameh’s father had been killed when he was six. His mother, and a sister named Jihad, never allowed him to forget the heroic life of his father, or the ancestral home in Kulleh which the victorious Israelis had flattened. For women, and especially mothers and grandmothers, were crucial in fanning the fires of hatred across the family generations, constantly reminding young males of the great deeds of their fathers, or jolting their emotions with idealised details of a way of life the family and an entire people had lost. It is worth quoting the sort of emotional pressures this super-terrorist was subjected to:
The influence of my father posed a personal problem to me. I grew up in a family which considered struggle a matter of heritage which should be carried on by generation after generation. My upbringing was politicised. I lived the Palestinian cause.
When my father fell as a martyr, Palestine was passed to me, so to speak. My mother wanted me to be another Hassan Salameh at a time when the most any Palestinian could hope for was to live a normal life.
Clearly that included him, for it was not automatic that he wished to become a terrorist:
I wanted to be myself. The fact that I was required to live up to the image of my father created a problem for me. Even as a child, I had to follow a certain pattern of behaviour. I could not afford to live my childhood. I was made constantly conscious of the fact that I was the son of Hassan Salameh and had to live up to that, even without being told how the son of Hassan Salameh should live.
It was not a deprived childhood, in material respects, for the father had bequeathed the large sums he had accrued before and during the Arab Revolt. The family lived in Damascus and then Beirut, with Ali Hassan Salameh sent to the famous Maqassed College and then Bir-Zeit university in the West Bank. He spent time at various German universities, studying engineering, but mainly indulging his taste for fancy sports cars and attractive women. Salameh cultivated a macho image, always dressing in black - with gold medallions - and spending a lot of time body-building and learning karate. In 1963 his mother persuaded him to marry a member of the Husseini clan, a union to which the aged mufti gave his blessing, although the groom would quickly embark on extramarital liaisons. The Six-Day War was the first intimation that he was responsive to family obligation, his illustrious name guaranteeing that the new recruit would soon come to the notice of Arafat. That is a key way ahead in many terrorist organisations.6
Black September’s first attempt to outdo Habash’s PFLP in the arena of spectacular hijackings was a disaster. In early May 1972, four terrorists - two men and two women - commandeered a Sabena flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv shortly after it left Vienna on the second leg of its journey. The British pilot relayed to Tel Aviv the hijackers’ demand for two hundred Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange for the eighty-seven passengers. When the aircraft landed at Tel Aviv, Israeli special forces, disguised in white ground-crew overalls, sabotaged it - draining the hydraulics and deflating its tyres - while negotiators sought to wear down the hijackers. Meanwhile, special forces personnel practised storming a Boeing 707 at another airport, honing their assault to ninety seconds’ duration. It took less than that time to carry out the mission when it happened. One hijacker was shot between the eyes by a soldier who appeared through an emergency hatch; another was killed with a couple of pistol shots. The two females were overpowered and captured. Any rejoicing at this operation proved premature. For Abu Iyad and other members of Black September had