Another Kind of Blowback

Another Kind of Blowback opens with a chillingly familiar scene:

Terrorists choose as their soft target a school containing dozens of children. After demonstrating that they mean business by killing a security guard and murdering several students, they proceed to hold the rest of the school hostage. In the midst of negotiations, a rescue mission manages to kill all of the terrorists, but only after the hostage takers shoot dead many of their young captives.

The year is 1974 and the place is Maalot in northern Israel. If this historic event has a grisly resonance after last week's massacre in Beslan Russia, it also provides a lesson on the potential for political and moral 'blowback' in today's Age of Terror.

The term "blowback" is typically reserved for the unintended consequences of American covert activity — e.g., arming the Afghans to fight the Soviets — but that's not the only kind of blowback out there:

Nineteen seventy four, the year in which 21 students were butchered by their Palestinian captors, was also the year in which Yassir Arafat was brought to the United Nations as the first non head of state to formally address the General Assembly. Indeed, as the 1973 Yom Kippur War and subsequent Arab oil embargo enriched the Middle East, that power was used to put the PLO at center stage of world affairs. Ironically, 1974 was also the year that the Soviet Union forged close ties with Arafat, inaugurating a Moscow office for the PLO that remains open today just a few hundred miles from the site of Russia's recent Maalot.

While participation in a schoolyard massacre should have put a political movement beyond the pale of human affairs, Maalot and the subsequent aggrandizement of the PLO demonstrates that the world was ready to reward handsomely, rather than punish, such behavior. It was a lesson well learned in the Middle East and elsewhere where political power and influence was the reward to those who demonstrated the greatest level of depravity.