The connection between the jailed Germans and the Black September demands was the RAF saw itself as part of a global anticolonialist movement. Many West German radicals of the late 1960s and 70s saw the Palestinian cause as well as other insurgencies such as the Tupamaros as larger components of a global struggle against the existing capitalist order. The idea of connecting up to such a romantic cause found a good deal of resonance among Europe's youth movements. Tom Nairn's book The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 is just one example of this particular zeitgeist and its very title evokes the idea of a transformational epoch. Ulrike Meinhof's writings in Konkret connected up leftist activism in Germany with wider revolutionary struggles within in the Third World. The members of the first generation of the RAF actually went to Jordan in 1970 to train with Fatah-linked guerillas.

On the surface, it would appear that Black September's relationship with the RAF at Munich and the 1973 Khartoum embassy attack was that of one terrorist organization helping out another allied one. But terrorism in the 1970s was never so clear-cut and not nearly as simplistic as Meinhoff's various articles suggested. Both Fatah and Black September had a strained relationship with their German allies. The RAF members in Jordan had made a nuisance of themselves during training and often demanded first-world comforts during their Jordanian interlude. One of the more telling gripes of Baader and company was that they demanded that the guerilla training camp install a coke machine. The sexual libertinism of the Germans, which was common among the German New Left, really did not have an analogue within the Middle Eats radicalism. Many of the German 68ers saw sexual liberation as a vital component of political radicalism; one of the more infamous incidents in the German student movement was the Busenaktion in which a number of topless female students interrupted Adorno's lecture by gyrating on him.

But despite these differences, the RAF and other West Europeans and Japanese who filtered into the Middle East were an asset even if they lacked the fortitude to live in Third World conditions. Their Western passports and identities allowed these individuals and groups to operate in areas where those of Middle Eastern origin were much more conspicuous. This was of utility, especially as counter-terrorism became more professional. The Japanese Red Army, for example, was able to mount one of the most destructive terrorist attacks on Israeli soil in the 1970s- the Lod Airport massacre- in no small measure because Israeli security did not expect a group of Japanese to be a security threat. There was a pressure to mount ever more spectacular and dramatic attacks as terrorism branched out in the 1970s and became more global. Factionalism within terrorist groups also played a role in this competition as organizations like Black September had to compete with groups like the PFLP, even if they were nominally on the same side. The Western terrorist groups like the RAF were an asset that groups like Black September used and managed to heighten their cause to the rest of the world. RAF attacks might have been more about West German politics and an attack on the FRG establishment, but RAF missives would invariably link these attacks to the Palestinian and other Third World causes. These Western groups additionally were a means of access to the Eastern bloc and alternative source for Soviet funding. Middle Eastern intelligence services in particular used Western terrorists like Ilich Ramírez Sánchez as go-betweens for the Warsaw Pact states and for attacks within Europe.

In hindsight, the type of self-identification of people like Meinhof to the Third World terrorism and its causes seems hopelessly naive. The imprisoned Meinhof's statement supporting the Munich attack, "The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle" illustrates not only a tone-deaf response to the attack, terming it "simultaneously anti-imperialist, antifascist, and internationalist," but also how little she understood of her place within Black September's formulations. The latter organization may have included the RAF in their various demands following an attack, but it was always an appendix to much more expansive demands for the freeing of jailed Middle Eastern radicals. The RAF might have seen their attacks on German and American targets as of equal importance to the global cause of the Palestinians, but this was a self-created linkage. Groups like Black September could not ignore the RAF completely for tactical reasons or the optics of leaving comrades in the lurch, but neither they nor their specific German grievances of much actual concern to Black September.

Sources

Aust, Stefan, and Anthea Bell. Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Kundnani, Hans. 2009. Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 generation and the Holocaust. London: Hurst, 2009.