Reflections on Terror: 50 Years Behind the Headlines

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Peter Taylor stepped nervously onto a plane in 1967, bound for the Middle East, he had no idea it was to be the start of a journalistic mission he would still be pursuing fifty years later. At the time “terrorism” was barely in our vocabulary. In the hundred or so documentaries he has made on the subject since then, Peter has tried to get behind the headlines to understand and explain a phenomenon which has grown to affect us all. Peter has reported the escalation of terrorism from the IRA and its Loyalist counterparts to Al Qaeda and the so called Islamic State. He has met the victims of terror, those involved in perpetrating terrorist acts and members of the intelligence services tasked with stopping them. Revisiting his own extraordinary archive has given Peter the chance to reflect on the evolution of terrorism and to recall some of his most memorable interviews. “There are moments when the interviews are chilling, moments when they're shocking and at other points they provoked a sharp intake of breath – surprising me by how prophetic they were.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	When I started working in television 50 years ago, I never imagined that I would spend the
0:15.5	best part of those years covering the phenomenon of terrorism.
0:20.4	And what about the handcuffs? Can we take the handcuffs?
0:23.8	The handcuffs have to stay on. Terrorism was barely part of our vocabulary in 1967.
0:30.4	But since then, I've tracked its evolution from the IRA to Al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State,
0:37.0	IS. The recent suspected jihadist attack in London shows that the danger is ever present.
0:44.8	Why did you join the Islamic State?
0:54.1	I'm Peter Taylor. I've made more than 100 documentaries about terrorism.
0:59.3	And I've been trawling through my archive for the BBC World Service.
1:03.2	You're listening to Reflections on Terror 50 years behind the headlines.
1:08.0	Behind the headlines, for me, sums up what I've tried to do over all these years,
1:18.2	which is to examine not what happens, but why things happen, what lies behind terrorism,
1:26.7	who are the people who are involved in perpetrating these many dreadful atrocities?
1:35.8	That's what I've tried to do. But also to look at the dilemmas that democratic states face
1:43.5	in trying to counter the threat of terrorism.
1:47.6	50 years ago, on my first assignment, I stepped nervously onto a plane to analyse the six-day
1:54.0	war between Israel and her Arab neighbours. I remember being driven to my hotel in Tel Aviv
2:00.1	by a taxi driver who only days before had been driving a tank in the Sinai desert.
2:09.1	The Arab-Israeli conflict raged unresolved through the next half century, punctuated by
2:15.2	massacres and assassinations. Terrorism can mean different things to different people. It isn't
2:21.7	black and white. States allegedly resort to it too, as Israel did to avenge the 1972
2:28.8	Munich Olympic Games Massacre. 11 Israeli athletes died following an attack by Palestinians
	...

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