"No one knew what to call them. For some they were skyjackers, for others air bandits. 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. 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."
"Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages, Jason Burke's survey of this set combines a flair for period detail sideburns and aviator shades, berets and Beretta pistols with impressive digests of Arab and Iranian history. Burke, the Guardian's international security correspondent, writes with amused detachment, sketching militants less as ideologues than oddballs. Kozo Okamoto of the Japanese Red Army, for instance, was an eccentric with two obsessions: cherry blossom and DDT."
"But there is a darker undertow. A male Berlin commune member likened women to horses: One guy has to break her in, then she's available for everyone. And this is how Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan Marxist who abandoned his studies at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University to join the Palestinian cause, summed up his training: I've been in the Middle East, learning how to kill Jews."
Hijackings proliferated across four continents in the 1970s because aircraft were easy to seize and proposed airport security measures were dismissed as overkill. The surge produced a transnational carnival of terrorism in which commandeering planes became a rite of passage for some countercultural and militant actors. Many participants mixed improvised violence with eccentric personal obsessions and weak ideological literacy, valuing the escapade over coherent political theory. Personal accounts reveal misogyny and communal brutality alongside exoticized revolutionary lifestyles. The decline of the left created a political vacuum that was rapidly exploited by emergent Islamist movements, reshaping global militancy.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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