Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [97]
Some of these armed groups were tools of neighbouring states, such as Iraq or Syria, others - notably the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by the former medical practitioner George Habash - sought to overthrow reactionary Arab governments, including that of his host king Hussein. As we shall see, the former Fatah member Sabri el-Banna, known as Abu Nidal, would constitute a further layer of complication when as a self-proclaimed rejectionist he declared war on the PLO as well as the Jews and Israelis, while acting as a hired assassin for various Arab governments. His role was emulated with gusto by the freelance Venezuelan Marxist-Leninist murderer Illich Ramirez Sanchez, nicknamed ‘Carlos the Jackal’. The Japanese Red Army would contribute a peculiarly sadistic note to these years. Its internal practices, evident from the tortured corpses of comrades buried around the scene of the winter 1972 siege of its snowy hideaway north of Tokyo, were more redolent of the cultic American mass murderer Charles Manson than of a typical terrorist movement. In addition to the dramatis personae, the tactics employed went international too.
Most of these radical Palestinian factions believed in internationalising their cause through the tactic of air piracy, a crime hitherto mostly confined to political refugees or, in the US where it was most frequent, to extortionists, the deranged and admirers of Fidel Castro, for virtually every hijacked aircraft in the 1960s was diverted from the US to Cuba. Uniquely horrifying because of the vulnerabilities of people held at gunpoint at thirty thousand feet, hijackings occurred so often - for there were no armed sky marshals, passenger screening or reinforced cabins - that pilots took plans of Havana’s José Marti runways on flights south to Florida, the routes where most hijackings occurred. There was even a routine form for the US to complete and lodge with the neutral Swiss embassy in Washington, to extricate stranded aircraft, passengers and crew from Cuba. In the summer of 1968 the tactic was globalised when PFLP terrorists commandeered an El Al flight and diverted it to Algeria, releasing non-Israelis while keeping the Israelis captive, in a clear act of ethno-religious malice. After two months, a threat by the International Airline Pilots Association to boycott Algeria resulted in the release of the hijacked passengers. When in August 1969 two Palestinians hijacked a TWA flight to Syria, the US quietly put pressure on the Israelis to release Palestinian prisoners to secure the freedom of the hijackers’ Israeli hostages. This would not be repeated, pour décourager les autres.1
Israeli armed intervention in Jordan to suppress guerrilla bands at source, and the strutting, extortionate behaviour of Palestinian fighters on the streets of Amman and elsewhere, forced king Hussein to crack down on the state within a state developing in his kingdom. For that is how one Palestinian fedayeen leader recalled it: ‘We were mini-states and institutions. Every sector commander considered himself God… everyone set up a state for himself and did what he pleased.’ Weapons were openly brandished and Palestinian fighters went around in vehicles without Jordanian licence plates. Local policemen were treated with contempt whenever they tried to do their job.
After armed clashes between the Jordanian army and Palestinian fighters, in which the latter allegedly celebrated one victory by playing football with the head of a Jordanian