It was a long time ago.  If I had to rely purely on memory I couldn’t even be sure of the year now.  But, you know, I was young and didn’t worry for the world as I do today.  I didn’t understand the need to hold fast to the remembrance of such dispiriting realities.  I didn’t understand why it would matter if, so many years later, they should slip out of the public mind, and mine.

So it was rather easy to forget.  Perhaps, too, forgetting went with the grain of the wood.  Seventies Britain was a different place with quite different expectations.  Life seemed more providential, and perhaps was.  We raced between the lights.  We were freer and more risk-taking or, perhaps, just more subject to the cheapening, egalitarian law of accident.  Now we are all wrapped up in cotton wool.  Death seems an intolerable affront.  But I don’t know that it was then in quite the same way. 

I should also say that we were also immeasurably more naïve then than now.  For one thing, the foul-minded, shit-hearted non-soldiers of the Provisional IRA had not begun leaving their murderous gifts in mainland pubs.  We saw terrorism on the nightly news.  But it was mostly on the island of Ireland, as the shit-hearts liked to put it.  Or it was even further away and involved Middle Easterners and Israelis.  This type of terrorism came to us through the most basic moral filter.  It was a filter through which only one side of the story ever got told.  We didn’t question it then.  We hadn’t learned to question everything.  But anyway it was a true filter.

How I know that is simple.  I was never a creature of leftist political leanings, the result, no doubt, of a happy childhood.  But anyway my mind was never disturbed by the compulsion to blame or harm those around me most like myself.  This repellent habit is the product of moral weakness, the habitués being unable to bear the weight of their own defects.  Marxism classical and modern lets them reflect it out, beyond even their possibly culpable parents and siblings.  Best of all, they can cover their tracks with faux-morality.  Nothing personal, you see.  Simple, really.

So, I had no need of veiled, marxian complexities in looking upon an act of so-called political violence.  Innocents are not soldiers and neither are the men and women who slaughter them.  This distinction was an absolute for me and screamingly obvious.  Those contrary individuals who disagreed or who tried to morph the argument into its opposite I considered defective, and still do.

Among those innocents who were not soldiers one must count foreign embassy or consulate staff, even if the embassy is that of a nation I may perceive as my enemy or my enemy’s friend.  All civilised peoples have respected this convention from the days of the Pharaohs.  But the whole point of shit-hearted terrorism is that such conventions have long been burned in the crucible of hate – or despair, if you are a leftist.  Where an embassy stands so stands the temptation to mortar or bomb or assassinate or, possibly, abduct.

So, yes, the details are sketchy.  A reception at the Saudi embassy somewhere in Africa … armed men crashing in … westerners seized.  Black September.  Arafat’s Black September of Munich fame.  Next, they actually demanded the release of Bobby Kennedy’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan.  That was so unrealistic it could only mean one thing.  President Nixon, impotent, made no move.  Then, waiting.  And then the inevitable executions, cold-blooded and deeply, deeply angering.  That I remember because, as Philip Larkin once wrote of love in a different context, it is anger that lives after the deed.

Other deeds in other places quickly surpassed this for brutality.  “Armed groups” of shit-hearted non-soldiers did their dunce-best to seize the global headlines.  We grew accustomed to them.  We tired of them.  The murder of innocents became … sorry, “political violence” became curiously banal.  The murderers’ efforts to attract our attention plumbed ever lower depths of immorality and cruelty.  It was a pornographic process.  Since we took less and less notice, not more, it was also literally overkill.  And, of course, it did not work, notwithstanding the crop of failed peace initiatives that it produced.  One generation of shit-hearts succeeded another.  Nothing changed.  It was all a complete and total failure and still is.  All the murders, all the agony of loss have been for nothing whatsoever.

Because of the miracle of the internet I now know the story of the Black September raid in March 1973 on the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum.  The attackers were eight Palestinians.  The attack was a slap in the face for the Sudanese and the Saudis, the first a supporter, the second the principal funder of the Palestinian “struggle”.  The innocents they seized were Cleo A.Noel Jn, the American Ambassador to Sudan, George Curtis Moore, American charge d’affaires and Guy Eid, Belgian charge d’affaires.

The entire grisly game was played out in the basement of the embassy building.  Negotiations, for want of a better word, were started.  At around 8:00pm on March 2nd the shit-hearts’ leader, Abu-Ghassan, was telephoned in the embassy by his commander Abu-Iyad (who was safely in Beirut).  The purpose of the call was to order the executions using the agreed code, Cold River [Nahr al-Bard]. 

“Remember Nahr al-Bard,” said Abu-Iyad, “The people’s blood in the Nahr al-Bard is screaming for revenge.  These are our final orders.  We and the world are watching you.”

The three men were machine gunned at 9:06, about half an hour later than planned because the terrorists allowed their victims to write a will and a last letter to their loved ones.  When the international media did not immediately report the killings Beirut became nervous.  Had something gone wrong?  Arafat took it upon himself to telephone Abu-Ghassan.  Had he received the code word Nahr al-Bard, he asked.  Did he understand what it meant?  Abu-Ghassan assured Arafat that he had understood everything and that his - Arafat’s - orders had been fully carried out.

The conversation was taped by the Israelis.  They had Arafat’s Beirut office bugged from top to bottom.  The tape was handed over to Nixon later that month.

There is a second post-script to this doleful story.  But again it relies upon my fading memories.  There was an interview of Arafat the Great Palestinian, the Nobelist, the Statesman on a British TV channel perhaps ten years ago.  It skittered across the usual territory … Isra-eeli tanks, Isra-eeli terrorism, Isra-eeli responsibility.  Then the interviewer asked a question that was not in the script.  Remember Khartoum?  Remember that fateful telephone conversation?  You can’t deny, can you Mr Chairman, that it was your voice on the tape … your order to murder those unarmed and helpless men?  Arafat froze.  Several delicious seconds passed while he struggled to come to terms with this sudden reversal.  And a reversal it was.  The man who was so familiar with the manipulation of language, so skilled at turning the moral tables was pinned under a table himself and could find no words to speak.  His face soured.  Finally, in a sullen admission of guilt, he replied that he had nothing to say about that.  Nothing at all.

I heard this morning that Arafat has passed away in a Paris hospital, at the age of 75.  But I’m thinking instead of those three men in that airless basement over thirty years ago.