Middle Eastern Terrorism: From Black September to September 11. By Mark Ensalaco. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 318 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4046-7.)

Abstract

The international community was faced with a novel kind of terrorism in the late 1960s, one very different from the lone anarchist or nihilist assassin of the nineteenth century, and the revolutions and counterrevolutions of the early twentieth century. This book focuses on the evolution of that new terrorism, from hijacking airplanes and kidnapping and murdering civilians to, eventually, suicide bombings. The major theme is how Americans came to be targeted and involved in terrorism, first emanating from the Middle East and eventually from a wider Muslim geography. Middle Eastern terrorism was internationalized at its inception. The terrorists justified murder in the name of “revolutionary violence, which is a political act,” and distinguished it from “terrorism, which is not” (pp. 6–7). The story began with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (plo) and its factions, with the motto “no one heard our screams and suffering” (p. 8). Western governments and intelligence agencies had neither the frame of mind nor the intelligence capacities or operational experience to deal with terrorism. In 1972, the Black September faction kidnapped Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich and demanded the release of Palestinian militants from Israeli jails as well as the Baader-Meinhoff leadership of the German Red Army Faction. The West German government refused help and advice from the Israeli counterterrorist unit and provided helicopters to the terrorists and captives, planning to set ambush at the airfield. But the operation failed and resulted in the massacre of all the athletes. However, in time, the plo, the Peoples Front for the Liberation of Palestine (pflp), and Black September managed to convince some European governments to release jailed terrorists, and, later, even Israel began to comply on occasion. By the time the plo turned against violence in the 1980s, other organizations had split into murderous factions (pp. 56–59).