Word: meinhof
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Shooting, bombing, kidnaping, they blazed through West Germany like a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde-and evoked much the same combination of fear and morbid fascination. Ulrike Meinhof was a skilled but emotionally insecure Hamburg writer; Andreas Baader was a pampered Mama's boy. Together, this unlikely couple, she 34 and he 25 when they first teamed up to do violence, became leaders of Western Europe's bloodiest terrorist outfit, dubbed by journalists the Baader-Meinhof gang...
...Novelist Becker (The Keep, The Union) indicates in her first documentary book, the Baader-Meinhof group sprouted from the roots of German student protest against archaic regulations and extreme overcrowding in the universities. But after West Berlin police shot a student demonstrating against a visit by the Shah of Iran, protest graduated to violence. Baader had come to West Berlin to escape the draft, Meinhof to be nearer the "revolution." There, they recruited colleagues who shared some basic zealotries: West Germany's "performance society" induced mental illness in its citizens; the struggle against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam must...
Even at its zenith in the early 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof gang never numbered more than about 25. Yet they frightened West Germany into a state of paranoia. Financing operations through frequent bank robberies, the gang set up bomb factories and, through their contacts with international terrorist groups, bought arsenals of weapons and ammunition. Suitably armed, the German terrorists embarked on a killing and bombing spree. They vented their rage on "consumer capitalism" by placing bombs in Frankfurt department stores. They struck at the hated Ami (unflattering German slang for "American") by setting bombs in U.S. Army headquarters in Heidelberg...
...while, Meinhof cranked out ideological justifications for the mayhem. For those with memories of the Third Reich, the incidents and propaganda had a chilling familiarity. Substantial segments of the European left began to praise the gang's actions as justified retaliations against the excesses of capitalism. The praise increased the gang's arrogance-and may have contributed to its fatal carelessness. Once the West German federal police set up special squads to cope with the terrorists. they found their quarries easy prey. In 1972 Baader blundered into police hands by racing up to a clandestine bomb factory...
...killings in the past, but there was something malevolently different about the Zahaby case. His alleged murderers were members of an extremist Muslim sect called Jamaat al Takfir wal Hijra (the Society for Repentance and Retreat), which has blended the urban terrorist tactics of West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang with something akin to the perverted zeal of Charles Manson's spiritual slaves. The society, which believes in repentance for sin and retreat from the evils of the modern world, is far more extreme than even the archconservative, fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. The movement is bitterly opposed...