YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Burke

lines on the record: 37
first: 2026-01-05
most recent: 2026-01-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Those attacks are the people who went out to do them believe they were coming back and wanted to come back. And it's the later, it's really with the Iranians and Hezbollah. And at the very end of the book and bin Laden, that you start to get something different.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's still an awful lot of the kind of commemoration, the rhetoric about death. I mean, the one key thing, though, just to go slightly anarchy, is there's a big difference between Fedain and suicide attackers. So Fedaeen are what the Palestinians call themselves and what lots of other Arab groups call themselves at the time, what my friend Faroq called his group, the Fedayan in Ichal, Fadayun of the people. And the Fedayin know that the risk of death is high when they go out to fight and they are prepared to lay down their lives. But they don't actively know it's going to happen And that may seem like a subtle difference, but it isn't. It's a really important difference in terms of 90% of those”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rhetoric. A lot of it is to do with the Iranian Revolution. Which really foregrounds that, partly because of the Iran-Iraq war, but the captain, Palestinian captain of the 1977 hijacking that gets old treatment in there of a German Lufthansa plane from Mallorca, he calls himself Captain Martyr Mahmoud. And almost every one of the all the groups, they always call the next attack after the last killed member As a sort of memorial to them. So there's certainly a lot.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now, you know, 50 years later, nobody would say that. So the question is almost sort of based on that idea. So the cult of martyrdom, I mean, it can be more explicit in the religious sense, and certainly it's explicit.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or would you see it as well in earlier groups? Yeah, no, I see. I'm not so certain about that. I mean, there's this, there's a brilliant line that one of the things that convinced me to write the book was there's a line from a British, I think, security official in about 1972 where he says, what? This is when somebody, there's an attack in which some of the attackers who are Palestinian die and looks like they've just sort of given their lives for the court and he says, that doesn't make sense. Arabs don't kill themselves, only the Japanese do. But it was a brilliant insight”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think Carlos is an exception. I think a lot of them, there's some of the later German leftists. I mean, Andreas Bader does. He loves the attention. Carlos does. But the really serious ones, and with the German leftists, they're usually the women, Gudrun Enslin, Bridget Monhaupt, who comes later. They don't, they're really not interested in that stuff at all. And they're, you know, if it helps the cause, maybe, but they don't usually think it does. And so they're absolutely not interested in it. The militants, certainly there's something cultic happening, cultish happening with some of them, which is a kind of different type of culture personality, but not the kind of more Stalinist sort of version.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, and they see actually, well, here's an interesting point. I mean, so Abdul Azam, who is like Ozama bin Laden's mentor He had his sort of epiphany as a religious militant because he heard Palestinian fedayen, so people like the PFLP, singing songs about their nation, and about the armed struggle. And he a Muslim Brotherhood cleric who, or clerical student, and he at the time, and he said to himself, how is it that these young people, the nationalist secular lot, who haven't got my faith, they are fighting and we are not. And that was the moment that he decided that he was going to commit himself to kind of jihad as such religious conflict and religious campaigns. So I think there was some very little that was explicit. I think they saw them as the enemy in part.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They certainly don't do them sympathetically. I'm trying to think of references. They barely refer to them at all, actually”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, another great question. Is 780 pages? If I'd added the far right, it would have been well over a thousand. The far right are less present, it has to be said. They crop up from time to time, so it may well have been the Nazis, the who supplied the weapons for the Munich attacks, for example. Ali Hassan Salameh, I was talking about earlier. He has had connections with the far right. So they play a kind of incidental role, but they weren't as they weren't doing as much as leftists were. And they certainly weren't doing the international stuff, which is what really interested me that the leftists were. So that's why I left them. Again, it's a perfectly valid area that needs investigation and needs more writing about.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would be wrong if I'd started in 1970 and ended in 1982. If I'd just called Mohammed Buddhia a womanizer and a terrorist, that would be wrong. And that would be a completely legitimate criticism. But I don't. I start much earlier. I explain why these people are there. I explain why they're doing what they're doing. And that, I think, is a legitimate”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had some of the revolutionists, some of the people I interviewed We're saying, well, why are you writing a big book about what you call terrorism? in the 1970s. That's not right. Why don't you write about state terrorism? And I'd say, listen, that is a completely legitimate topic. And I do actually touch on it. But it would be a...”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of these kind of terminology, you know, terminological issues as best I can. And you get it right, hopefully, more than you get it wrong.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and that does not help us understand them or their activities. People can argue against that. People can argue for it. I find it works for me. It's a compromise, but I think you can see and... You can talk about terrorism absolutely clearly. You can also say somebody is a terrorist if they have committed a terrorist act. In a big book like this, either I use it all the way through or I don't use it at all and I decided that to use it all the way through would not help so I didn't. But it's open to discussion. That was my choice Gabrielle wherever you are. There's other stuff like the armed struggle that they talk about quite a lot. So I use that with caps, for example, to make it clear that I'm not saying it's the arm struggle. Do we talk about they would talk about the resistance? I wouldn't because that's a clear judgment. And I have tried as I try in my journalism to navigate an absolute minefield.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We trust journalists How would you use it? At my day job, I do that. All day, every day. It's a really, really good question, so which I address in the preface. And when we're saying that you're going to get people who don't like any way you cut it basically, they'll either tell you you should put stuff in, put stuff out, use different things. So my argument on terrorism and the use of terrorism, revolutionists is a literal. I mean, it's a great work because it comes from the 19th century and it's people who actually did do professional revolutionaries. But it's also a compromise between revolutionaries, which is what some people call them and terrorists, which is what others call them. So it touches on both. My argument with terrorism, terrorists, and particularly the word terrorist, is that terrorism is a thing that you can see name and define terrorist is a useful adjective as a consequence. As a noun, I think it is unhelpful because it reduces an individual to a single category.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time it did not seem wrong. It was really interesting. Those sort of things were really powerful. Those interviews were amazing.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think is one consideration, but I think it's really important to have that thought is really important to have that explanation and put in a historical context where I'm not uncritically accepted. He basically said, I believed in... Marxist-Leninism, I believe that the reactionary clerical regime would fall of its own accord, that it could not stand historically materialism tortoise, it could not stand. And”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Destroyed other opposition groups, eventually destroyed the communists, at which point the Fedain Heuk, his group, were the only ones left and the penny dropped. And at that point, he had prepared escape route, so they all got out as many of them as could got out. He got out. It was quite epic how he got out. But what was really interesting talking to him was until that point it had been really easy. And to his credit, he never said, no, you can't write that. But we got to that point and I had to ask him, basically. You know, do you regret those decisions? You know, and he never answered it strange. He always just said, I can explain why I made those decisions. And in a sense, that's kind of why I wanted to write the book, to explain why those people made those decisions. They regret them, whether we can and should condemn a lot of them.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One way or another, the deaths of lots of people and some close to him, I imagine. And he basically decided that the Marxists, his Marxist-Leninists, should cooperate, support the radical clerical regime after Khomeini took power. And this is after fighting the Shah tooth and nail, losing his best friend, being in prison, all the rest of it. And he kept that position for two or three years, during which time the radical clerics cracked down on women's rights, sent thousands of people to prison of whom few emerged”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We spent hours and hours talking days and doing these interviews were really interesting because he was really happy to talk and he was really good at talking and he's a really honest interviewee which was really helpful because with all these guys I was kind of cross checking everything they said against all these other sources and as I said with Leila Haledic I get complicated but I never said actually that's total rubbish you know it's not going to help in an interview but the with Faroque it was great we had this really good rapport and we spoke about everything until we got to one bit of his story and that was when he made Judgments that Only at the very least helped.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was the leader of the left, the kind of left wing, the Fedayni Khalkh, the hard left. Very hard left. Opposition to the Shah of Iran, whose role, and actually they did the brunt of an actual kind of terrorism of the... 70s and were the ones who the Slavak, the Iranian Secret Service would focus on most. They were seen as the biggest threat. Not the Islamic side, the Khomeini and his people, the clerics who came in later because there was a vacuum. But the interesting thing about Faro, I mean, I'm talking about briefly, but because it talks of going back to this point about how you do these interviews. And Haroq and I spent a long time. Tell me where you found it first. Well, he's in Brentford. It's a very long course. He's in Brentford. He's a lovely man.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Farouka, you found the nice thing about Faroq is actually it's more, I mean, we could talk about him for ages, he was a leftist, lead with a leftists in Iran who actually led the resistance. Farooq Nagar.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“kind of deriving an awful lot of its power from those previous ideas. And I think that made it much easier to graft onto what had come before. Has a big element of social conservatism, obviously, which is very different, that will appeal to some. And it has the faith and identity, the sense of authenticity. And it also, very important, it comes at the moment when the other ideologies, the leftist, secular nationalist ones, have demonstrably failed. Achieve anything And that means it's also being pushed hard by the Saudis and all sorts of other stuff going on. But that is absolutely crucial.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From kind of leftist French thinkers into Persian and then into Arabic particular kind of quotes that you can see sometimes explicitly homeeniome uses them but that the broader you know the targets are colonialism, imperialism, Zionism and stuff that you know Ulrike Meinoff would absolutely recognize although she would have had very different views on the role of women but the so apart from the sort of social conservatism that the political package and that political will”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The language of the Islamism and later that religious kind of package, those ideologies, draws very heavily on the earlier leftist secular stuff. And I hadn't really realized there are words you can track.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He itemizes some of those brothers were kind of playboys. He was always that kid who's a bit weird. He was really, he was praying at doing the totally optional middle of the night prayer from the age of like 13. But he grows up in this environment that is very 70s. I mean, he's born in 57. He's a teenager when there's stuff like the 73 war and the oil crisis. There's the Israeli raid on Intebe in 76. There's Iranian Revolution in 79. Most importantly, the seizure of the mosque by these Islamic militants in 79. And I know that he was very affected by this because I spoke to people who were close to him, who remembered him being very affected by this. And so he grows up steeped in the 70s. But also, and this is something that's really important. And bring out in the book”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that said explicitly in an amazing bit of research that was done in 1981 by an Egyptian sociology that I died up, where he actually went and interviewed lots of Islam militants in Egyptian prisons and then compared them to the leftist militants and just basically said they're the same people in terms of their profile, in terms of their backgrounds, in terms of their makeup. Except they had this advantage in that they are literally speaking the same language.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When Arafat is forced to leave the Israelis invade and with an express intention of destroying the PLO and they'd succeed effectively, they scatter the PLO, they Arafat is forced to leave, goes into exile in Tunis. And given that the success is elsewhere by other regimes in the region in just obliterating the left, there's a vacuum. But the grievances are still there. Life has not got better for most people. The original impetus to look to change things has not changed. And there is a new and loud message. And it crucially, I think, doesn't just offer social justice and revolution. However, misguided. But it also offers identity. And an identity that is much easier for millions of particularly young people to buy into themselves.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not that the ideology is interchangeable, but that you can express the same grievances in a different vocabulary, if that vocabulary still makes sense to you. And I think the early vocabulary in the early 70s no longer made any sense to a lot of people in the Middle East after 79, 80, 81, 82. And that process was also very much helped by the fact that a lot of the key people involved in that earlier movement were dead or were in prison or who were scattered. So at the very end of the book, you're in 82 in Beirut.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You see, there's a sort of hinge moment. I mean, that one's going to have a whole biography of Mughnia, but basically a lot of the people who were attracted to the secular movement move over to the Islamist movement at the end of the decade or after the Iranian revolution. And there are lots of examples of that. And it's a really interesting question about why... Would do that and how they would do that. And to me it speaks to a much broader point, which is that”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wave of activism, some of it violent. But you end in a completely different place. So you end, and I end the book actually with”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The heart of the kind of intellectual heart of the book, if you can have such a thing, is looking up. Why in the West Start in the same place with the revolutionary moment of the late 70s. In the West you get a flaring of violence through the early 70s and by the end of the 70s it's really disappearing or certainly by the early 80s it's moved into something else Nothing is threatening. There is violence mainly ethno-separatists, so mainly IRA, ETA, that sort of thing, but nothing that's going to bring down a government and nothing that's going to really motivate the kind of educated middle class youth or the mass working classes. I mean, that's gone. But in the Middle East, you start in the same place with a kind of secular-ish nationalist, left-leaning.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And then we're into something else that has been building in the Middle East through the decade In the next three years. Going to see very, very clearly, and they're not going to be like Ali Hassan Salam.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discussing the rights and wrongs of liberal democracy with the Australian Austrian home minister in nineteen seventy eight months before he was killed. He's got friends in the CIA, one in particular. He's very well connected. He's shutting down the violence and he's saying to the Europeans, listen, we don't want trouble. We want you to recognize the PLO as a legitimate organisation and be able to open representative offices in your capitals. We can make sure that the other groups, the PFLP, EXO and they all keep quiet, but you've got to give us something. And he's conducting these very kind of cordial but very delicate negotiations. Where's a suit? All the rest of it. He's killed in January 79. Exactly at the moment, nobody takes much notice because the whole of the Western media is focused on one event. which is the Iranian Revolution.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's got to the stage where he is negotiating basically non-aggression pacts between the PLO and And the PLO I need to learn this, by the way, and not maybe is the overarching organization for all the Monty Pythonesque little ones, basically. So the PFLP is part of the PLO, so Arafat is in charge of it. And Sane was his aide. So Salome was there as an envoy.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you get Disneyland actually, or Disney World, Which he didn't like. And when you get to a character like that, you kind of think I've got to include him. Now, he's amazingly interested. He's kind of flamboyant. He listens to Elvis all the time. He drives fast cars. He speaks English, French, German, Arabic. He's a very politically or becomes a very politically savvy operator. So when Arafat decides no more of these kind of long-range terrorist attacks, he just goes, okay, fine. And he shuts down all these operations. And later he is acting as a, all the way through this, actually, he's acting as a channel, direct channel with the CIA. The CIA tried to recruit him. He says, I'm not interested in being recruited. And that actually is what kills him in the end.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enough covers with his shades and his long shirt and everything. So Salami was Palestinian, comes from Palestinian resistance in inverted commas. Aristocracy, as he would call it, in that his dad died in 1948 in the wars around the foundation of Israel. And he was very quickly picked up by the PLO in the late 60s, went into their intelligence side, got involved in black September attacks as the organization was known, wasn't involved in the Munich attack on the Olympics, but around that doing things. And became one of Arafat's close aides. It's a very interesting guy. And his only person I've ever been able to write about. And describe how he went on honeymoon with the A second wife, or actually a bigamous wife, who was Miss Universe and went to Hawaii. With all expenses paid by the CIA.”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“La Cerie de Houlu Original Furiers Arives, Avoc Amy Rossum, Furieus Suilagent du FBI, Alice Black, a la Portie, Mysterious, Ecalculatris, Vera Justice Mesa Musur colour ventrome la frontier entroposes,”
2026-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT