Jason Burke

The early 1980s, however, would prove a turning point not only for Lebanon and the wider region, but also for America's reputation there.

That at least is the contention of the journalist and writer Kim Ghattas, whose new book, The Best Kind of American: The True Story of Murder, War, and America's Undoing in the Middle East, looks at the murder of Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut in 1984.

The setting, Beirut in the early 1980s, takes us to a city already divided by several years of war.

Colorful political personalities are brought to life from PLO leader Yasser Arafat to Lebanese Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel.

And so they were calling upon the Syrians and, and, and the Egyptians to help them support the Palestinian cause against Israel and the, the, the, the Christians.

Yes.

Now, we had the, um, the writer Jason Burke on the podcast recently, actually, where he talks about this.

You, you know-

you're not you're not these little hard done two minnows

lads no you can't be surprised when football or organization within football work within entire self-interest i think it's a really interesting article that jason burke the telegraph did where he's gone around speaking to all the different clubs about how they feel about it and the range of responses he got was actually quite stark so I'm going to read out some of them now some people said they had a desire to see City thrown out of the Premier League not even admitted to the EFL there was discussions of whether City should face up to 200 points being deducted over multiple seasons Concern that transfer fees and monies owed to clubs will now not be paid by City, a fear that getting rid of them will lead to a resurrection of the European Super League, arguments that the Premier League is better with City in it and its reputation will be damaged globally without them.

We'll get to that in a

minute.

So, yeah, I would expect, given that this was happening, I mean, this has been happening since, what, the 60s? So, yeah, you can expect this to ratchet back up.

And it's not unprecedented unfortunately there was a ton of this kind of violence i'm reading a book about this um i think it's called revolutionaries uh let me pull this up really fast that talks about this and goes through um a lot of this early violence in the 60s and 70s dude audible just makes this way too hard yeah the revolutionists by jason burke

the revolutionists okay

Yeah, so he details some of the more famous people and how, of course, it's always upper class, upper middle class, people that can live off of basically their parents' wealth that end up becoming these revolutionaries.

It's really interesting.

Also, we had Jason Burke on the show a few months ago to talk about his book, The Revolutionists.

And he talked in that book, and your book really reflects this through the prism of Carlos, of how because of terrorists like Carlos and terrorism like the stuff that he was carrying out, Western intelligence agencies had to become good at combating terrorism.

So this is not just the rise of terrorism, it's the rise of counterterrorism.

That idea of using the spectacle of violence to achieve a radical political goal, a revolution even, that's pretty novel and something confined to the age of mass media.

That's the contention of journalist Jason Burke, the Guardian's international security correspondent.

Jason recently brought out a book called The Revolutionists, the story of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s.

In it, he looks to identify the progression of such tactics, seeing their origin not in the attacks of September 11th, but several decades earlier in the wave of secular leftist attacks of the 1960s and 1970s.

I'm Faisal Yafai.

Here's this week's episode of The Lead.

Jason Burke, welcome to the podcast.

It's great to be here.

[laughs]

But all of this, this strange swirling kind of radical politics that we associate with Germany from the seventies, all of this is what I talked about in my interview with Jason Burke, who told us the story of the revolutionists, as he called it, that generation of radicals that, you know, strangely enough, you have like the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades in Germany-

Yes

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