The Lawfare Podcast · The Lawfare Institute

Lawfare Daily: Ideology, Action, and Terrorism in the 1970s

February 24, 2026·51 min·4 clips

Why did researching ISIS lead journalist Jason Burke 15 years further back to a surprising global moment of leftist and Islamist ferment?

The episode begins with Lawfare senior editor Michael Feinberg introducing Jason Burke, a Guardian journalist who has covered extremism for decades, to discuss his book The Revolutionists about the milieu of 1970s terrorism across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Burke explains that the book grew from research for an earlier ISIS project, when he discovered that the roots of Islamic militancy traced back further than the 1980s Afghan war to the mid-1960s, where leftist and Islamist revolutionary movements were emerging simultaneously. He highlights the near-contemporaneous deaths of Che Guevara in 1967 and Sayyid Qutb in 1966 as markers of a shared global moment of revolutionary ferment that preceded the 1968 protest wave. Burke describes how Palestinian armed groups of the era were secular, nationalist, and leftist-leaning, making them compatible with the broader international radical left, while Islamist movements were building influence in parallel and borrowing vocabulary and tactical concepts from anti-colonial and Marxist thinking. He explains that once the leftist revolutionary project failed and was repressed in the Middle East during the 1970s, a vacuum opened that radical Islamists filled in the late 1970s and 1980s. The conversation profiles key figures including Andreas Baader, whom Burke characterizes as a loud-mouthed simplistic thinker whose girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin and journalist Ulrike Meinhof were the actual intellectual forces behind the Red Army Faction. Burke recounts the meeting between Jean-Paul Sartre and Baader in Stammheim prison, where Sartre emerged saying he expected a friend but was sent a judge, finding Baader's revolutionary theory unconvincing. Carlos the Jackal is described as a poor operational terrorist whose attacks frequently went wrong, including a farcical attempt to fire a rocket at a plane from an airport toilet that failed because the viewing platform was crowded on a weekend. Burke notes that Carlos survived through relational manipulation and an understanding of celebrity rather than tactical skill. The discussion turns to governmental responses, with Feinberg noting that Western European states often took an accommodating approach to Palestinian terrorism while Middle Eastern governments like Jordan and Saudi Arabia responded with mass violence, and neither approach was effective. Burke explains that Western governments in the early 1970s lacked even basic legal frameworks for dealing with hijacking, noting that when Leila Khaled landed at Heathrow after an attempted hijacking, the only charge available was an immigration offense. He traces how the conception of terrorism shifted from a political problem requiring political solutions in the 1970s to an evil requiring military eradication under the Reagan administration in the 1980s. After 9/11, Burke argues, European governments reverted to the 1970s political-roots framework while the United States reverted to the 1980s military-response framework, and neither side learned from the other period's mistakes. The episode concludes with a discussion of why 1970s terrorism remains culturally compelling, with Burke suggesting it was the last era when young people genuinely believed individual action could transform the world, an idealism that dissipated by the early 1980s and never returned.

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