“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

-Henry Adams

Municipal buses have always had an uncanny knack for attracting civil unrest.

Be it in Birmingham, London, Baghdad, or in downtown Beirut – public buses often act as giant motorized canaries for the fumes of civil disorder and discontent. Why buses serve this function is a complex issue, it is likely a combination of the physical role they play packing a large number of people into one uncomfortably close environment, and their role as a vital means of the mass transportation that every modern society relies on.

Whatever the reason, throughout modern history harbingers of coming civil unrest have been among the city bus’s most important passengers. And on April 13^th 1975 in East Beirut, a city bus would serve – not for the first time and not for the last either – as the point of nucleation for a savage civil conflict.

In retaliation for the deaths of four Christians who were shot leaving a Maronite church earlier that day, Christian militiamen turned their guns on a bus full of Palestinian refugees on the way back to their ramshackle refugee camp located in East Beirut within the Christian neighborhood they were traveling through. The attack killed everyone onboard except one passenger and the driver, leaving 29 dead, and is widely referred to as the massacre that officially marks the start of the Lebanese Civil War.

The 1970s weren’t a tumultuous time just for the hemp-weaving free-loving acid-dropping flower-children of America. While an American society was slowly rending itself apart along generational cleavages, over in the Middle East an entire culture – a piece of what can arguably be viewed as the remnants of an entire civilization – was consuming itself with much less subtlety.

This societal decay gave way to the broad social forces which tilled and softened the region for the growth of Islamic fundamentalist terror. During the 1970s, every single Arab nation in the Middle East was ruled by one autocratic form of government or another, and it was nearly impossible to find a group of citizens who felt empowered to better their situation through means offered by the state.

So they turned to terrorism.

The unrest of the 1970s set the stage for everything from Saddam’s rise to power, the targeting of Israel by generations of suicide bombers, the emergence of an alphabet soup of terrorist groups ranging from AMAL to Zeal, the Iranian revolution and the US Embassy hostage crisis, and even the events of 9/11. To understand modern terrorism you must first understand Middle Eastern society as it was in the 1970s, and what made it unique. With that, you can then understand the implications of the social decay that was redoubling with every passing year.

There isn’t one instance of Islamic fundamentalist terror that has occurred since that can’t be tied back to that decade. From founding new techniques and approaches in terror to inspiring the ideology that would drive future groups, the 1970s lay at the crossroads of everything that we’ve come to call terrorism.

It was during this time, in the words of Fawaz Gerges, who was raised in the midst of the most dramatic and deadly civil war the region has ever hosted, that “religious fervor in the Arab world fed into rage over economic social, and political impotence,” and “more and more Muslims turned to religion for spiritual sustenance and as a refuge from and a response to the seemingly unstoppable Westernization of their societies and oppressive political authoritarianism.”¹

One of these Muslims was Osama bin Ladin, who came of age during these angry years, and developed his own ideas about Islam because of them. The story of the Middle East is very much the story of Islam. A religion today that is more tightly bound to a distinct people than any other, Islam is the only religion ever to become the sole uncontested basis of an entire civilization. So before you can understand the story of the Middle East in the 1970s, a brief foray must be made into the story of Islam.

Unlike any other major world religion, the holy book of Islam, the Quran, managed to codify not only laws, precepts, mores, and traditions – but an entire language. And in the process it would establish the basis for Arab identity, the exact definition of which is open to debate, but is most often defined as being fluent in some form of the Arabic language.

It’s this sense of Arab cum Muslim identity that’s at the crux of the emergence of modern Islamic terror. To have any chance of understanding today’s terrorism, you must first have some idea of when and where the terrorists themselves get their sense of identity. A few hundred years after he explained Mary of Nazareth’s predicament to her, Muslims believe the angel Gabriel appeared to the prophet Muhammad, grabbed him in a holy bear-hug, and related in the most divine language words which would be recorded by Muhammad’s own hand and, over time, be compiled as the Holy Quran.

The divinity of the angel Gabriel’s speech is an important aspect of the early days of Islam and influences its status today. Muslims are certain that the lyrically perfect nature of the language in which the Quran was recorded is proof of its divinity – no fool mortal could’ve concocted words of such eloquence and internal harmony.

And Mohammad isn’t viewed as just another mortal receptacle of Gabriel’s word.