Author: Amir Taheri
Publication: Weekly Standard
Date: November 24, 2003
Carlos the Jackal pledges alliance
to Osama bin Laden
Few Convicted Murderers and hijackers
accept the label "terrorist." One who does--indeed, who embraces terrorism
as among man's "noblest pursuits"--is a Venezuelan now serving a life sentence
for murder in France. He is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better
known as "Carlos the Jackal."
He has just published a book in
French to announce his conversion to Islam and present his strategy for
"the destruction of the United States through an orchestrated and persistent
campaign of terror." Entitled "Revolutionary Islam" (Editions du Rocher,
2003) and published under the name Ilich Ramírez Sánchez-CARLOS,
the book urges "all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even
atheists," to accept the leadership of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden
and so help turn Afghanistan and Iraq into the "graveyards of American
imperialism."
Son of a militant Communist, Ilich
was sent to Moscow to study at Patrice Lumumba University, an institution
set up by the KGB to train terrorists from the Third World. That was in
the 1970s, when the most fashionable cause was opposition to the U.S. intervention
in Indochina.
Ilich opted for the less fashionable
cause of Palestine, and soon moved to Lebanon, where he trained for operations
organized by George Habash's People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP).
Western intelligence services first
noticed Ilich when he murdered two French policemen and a Lebanese informant
in Paris in 1975. But the peak of his career came in 1975, when he led
the team that took 11 OPEC oil ministers hostage in Vienna, then flew them
to Algiers.
He spent most of the next 20 years
on the run, living under assumed identities, constantly changing protectors,
until his Sudanese friends finally betrayed him six years ago, when they
allowed French authorities to abduct him from his home in Khartoum and
fly him to Paris for trial. In his book, Carlos recounts that he was born
into a "fairly prosperous" bourgeois family. His father had attended a
French school run by Catholic priests but soon rejected their beliefs.
"Having lost faith in God," Carlos says, his father "looked to Marx and
Lenin to fill at least part of the gap." Sánchez père was
so passionate about his new creed that he named all three of his sons after
the founder of Bolshevism: Vladimir, Ilich, and Lenin.
The chief interest of Carlos's book,
however, lies not in the reminiscences of a bit player from the 1970s,
but in the light it sheds in two areas. First, it recounts how Arab states
like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq routinely used terrorism as
an instrument of state policy, often with support from the Soviet Union
and its allies. And second, it illuminates the connection between radical
atheism and radical religion, showing how one ideology can serve as the
antechamber to another seemingly its opposite. Just as Carlos's father
made Marxist-Leninist ideology his religion, so Carlos has turned his new
religion into the ideology of "revolutionary Islam."
By the mid-1980s Carlos had decided
that Marxism-Leninism was a dying creed. Yet its goal, the destruction
of imperialism personified by the United States, remained in his view "the
highest goal of humanity." Carlos had also concluded that the United States
could not be destroyed by any military rival. What was needed was a campaign
of terror that would separate the United States from its allies and then
destroy its self-confidence. This campaign would require a large number
of volunteers ready both to kill and to die for the cause. Carlos saw that
only revolutionary Islam could recruit the large numbers of killers and
martyrs necessary to destroy the United States.
Carlos claims that terrorism is
"the cleanest and most efficient form of warfare." By killing civilians,
he argues, the terrorist saps the morale of the enemy and forces its leadership
to submit to the demands of the revolution or surrender. By killing a few,
the terrorist saves the lives of the many. He cites several examples. In
November 1979, Iranian "students" raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran and
took diplomats hostage. The Carter administration, fearful that the Americans
would be executed, abandoned its "plots" against the Khomeinist revolution,
and thus forestalled events that could have led to the deaths of tens of
thousands of people.
Similarly, when Hezbollah suicide
bombers attacked American targets in Beirut in 1983, a total of 300 Americans,
including 241 Marines, were killed, forcing Washington to abandon its ambition
of reshaping Lebanon. And in 1993 the murder of 18 U.S. Army Rangers in
Mogadishu forced President Clinton to withdraw American peacekeepers from
Somalia and abandon plans for the Horn of Africa, avoiding bigger conflicts
that could have cost many more lives. Carlos does not say why it is good
for mankind to destroy the United States. His method is religious and admits
of neither doubts nor counterarguments. The West is evil, and the United
States is the leader of the West. Thus the United States is evil. At one
point he says the United States is an incarnation of Satan (Shaytan) and
should, therefore, be hated without question, just as believers hate Satan
without asking why.
Carlos urges Islamist groups to
conclude alliances with all radical elements, including Maoists and nationalists,
in a joint campaign against the United States. He wants all radicals to
rush to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Americans, while hordes of "volunteers
for martyrdom" organize suicide attacks inside the United States. And he
makes a number of forecasts: The United States will reshape Iraq, Syria
will disintegrate, and Lebanon will fall apart while Hezbollah is destroyed.
Kosovo will become independent, and Sudan will be carved up. Libya will
surrender to the United States. Even France will be divided into smaller
countries, according to what Carlos claims is a secret American plan worked
out by Henry Morgenthau in the 1940s. Carlos believes that, in the medium-term
at least, only two states--North Korea and Iran--will be able to resist
the United States, thus representing "the last hopes of mankind." The war
against the United States, then, is going to be a long one, and the Americans
will win the first rounds.
One question worth exploring in
all this is whether Carlos is really a Muslim. Since Islam has neither
baptism nor excommunication, we have no grounds for saying he's not. But
neither is there reason to think he has any authority to speak on behalf
of Islam. He is an individual with a peculiar view of the world that has
nothing to do with what Islam has taught for 15 centuries. Moreover, his
knowledge of Islamic doctrine, theology, history, and political philosophy
is almost nonexistent. He thinks the first four caliphs were members of
a dynasty known as the "Rashidis," and he confuses Hajjaj Ibn Yussef, the
brutal governor of Kufa, with Mansur al Hallaj, the mystic who was crucified
for blasphemy.
At one point Carlos presents himself
as "the voice of Islam and history." At another point he poses as an authority
on theology (fiqh) and offers a plan for "reforming the faith" under which
"obligations" such as prayer, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca become
secondary. Instead, the number one duty of Muslims becomes "fighting the
United States by any means" available. He dwells on the necessity for all
Muslim men to grow beards and all Muslim women to wear the "revolutionary"
head-cover (the hijab) invented in Lebanon in the 1970s. He says that beards
and the hijab can be used as tools of terror, to dishearten the Americans
by reminding them that "their enemy Islam" is in their midst.
Carlos tells us little about the
Islamic utopia that will cover the globe once Islam is established as "the
sole religion of mankind." At one point he praises the Khomeinist system
of rule by a mullah or group of mullahs. At another, he presents the "emirate"
created by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 1998 as the model. Carlos is not
interested in Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines, or Myanmar, where Muslim
minorities are in conflict with non-Muslim states. Nor does he care if
Muslims live under corrupt or even genocidal rulers, as long as those rulers
are unfriendly toward the United States.
Where Islamists are fighting regimes
that Carlos favors, he brands them "bandits" and "murderers." In this way
he condemns Islamists who are fighting the Libyan regime. He is especially
harsh on Algerian Islamist terrorists, whom he labels "gangsters." The
reason is that Carlos was for years protected by the Algerian secret service.
A name-dropper, Carlos makes his
own terrorist career out to have been something of historic significance.
He pretends that many Arab leaders, from Muammar Qaddafi to Hafez al-Assad
to Yasser Arafat, were his friends. He also claims to have known former
Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto "very well," though he does not say in
what circumstances.
Carlos mentions the names of the
seven men he most admires. Oddly enough, five are Palestinian Christians:
George Habash, Waddi Haddad, Nayef Hawatemah, Kamal Nasser, and Naji Allosuh.
Two are Muslim Arabs: the Algerian president, Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika, whom
he calls "my beloved brother," and fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden,
upon whom he bestows the title of "sheikh."
Carlos's admiration for Bouteflika
is based on a misunderstanding. Carlos writes that Bouteflika agreed to
become president of Algeria mainly to prevent his country from being absorbed
into the NATO system, "a tool of the United States." Carlos seems unaware
that Algeria had already established a relationship with NATO. Indeed,
at next May's NATO summit, Algeria along with three other Arab states and
Israel will join a "partnership for peace" with the alliance.
Carlos is wholly dedicated to inciting
Muslims to hate the United States and not at all interested in inspiring
them to change the regimes that oppress them. The reason may lie in his
own long association with some of the most repressive Arab regimes--regimes
that, frightened by the liberation of Iraq, fear they may be the next dominoes
to fall as the democratic impulse reaches the Middle East.
Amir Taheri is an Iranian journalist
based in Paris.
