Book review: The Siege

If you’re looking for a new book to read that provides some historical context for current events, The Siege (Ben Macintyre, 2024) might be a reasonable choice. It’s about a spring 1980 takeover of the Iranian embassy in London. Why did an Iranian Arab (more on that below) and his Palestinian friends decide that was rational to take hostages?

The plan was undoubtedly risky, but terrorist hostage-taking could yield spectacular results, and there was a precedent. Five years earlier, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, led a group of pro-Palestinian militants, the Arm of the Arab Revolution, in an assault on a meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna. They took more than sixty hostages and killed three people. Ramírez Sánchez threatened to kill a hostage every fifteen minutes unless the Austrian authorities read a communiqué on the radio and television networks every two hours. After complex negotiations and a two-day standoff, the authorities agreed to broadcast the terrorists’ statement, and allowed the gunmen to fly to sanctuary in Algeria and Libya, having secured a large ransom and global publicity for the Palestinian cause. All the terrorists and hostages walked away. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons subsequently forbade granting safe passage to anyone killing, kidnapping, or attacking a diplomatic official, but, in practice, governments were prepared to negotiate. The assault on the Iranian Embassy was directly modeled on the OPEC siege. For reasons both symbolic and practical, London was selected as the ideal target. Many Iranian Arabs held Britain responsible for their plight: the British government had supported the semi-independent sheikhdom of Arabistan before switching allegiance to Reza Shah in 1925. The group would pass unnoticed among London’s large Middle Eastern population. “British police are not armed,” the Fox assured Towfiq. “They will not attack you.” London was packed with journalists and other members of media organizations, domestic and international, who were not controlled by the government. News coverage would be huge. With his command of English, Towfiq would manage negotiations with the police and the press.

In other words, the West’s previous accommodation of hostage-takers led to additional hostage taking. (Towfiq and the Palestinians circa 1980 probably never imagined that hostage takers would become the most celebrated folks on Ivy League campuses, though!)

The root cause of the 1980 siege seems to be that much of Iran’s oil is underneath a part of a Iran that traditionally contained no Iranians.

The region abutting the Persian Gulf known to its Arab inhabitants as Arabistan, or Ahwaz (which is also the name of the region’s capital), was once the center of an ancient civilization. The majority of its inhabitants are Arabs, Shia Muslims, but they are ethnically distinct from the Aryans of Iran, or Persia, as it was traditionally known (“Iran” is the Farsi word for “Land of the Aryans”). By the mid-nineteenth century, the region had been absorbed into Persia, but its sheikhs enjoyed semi-independence from Tehran. When the shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, took power (with British backing) in 1925, he set about “Persianizing” the region, a policy his son intensified: Farsi replaced Arabic as the official language, Iranian nationalists settled in the thousands, and senior official positions were filled by Farsi-speaking Persian Iranians. The province was renamed Khuzestan, an Iranian name. Arab opposition was suppressed. This Persianizing policy was motivated by power politics and ethnic prejudice but mostly by greed: for beneath the region’s desert sands bubbled a vast ocean of oil. Had fate dealt differently with the region, it might have become another Gulf oil state, like Qatar or Kuwait, with a small Arab population, and a lot of money. Instead, its oil riches bankrolled the shahs, exploited in concert with the British, then with the Americans. The expensive rugs and chandeliers in Iran’s London embassy were paid for with Khuzestan’s oil. At the height of the shah’s power, some five million barrels were being exported from the province daily, about one-tenth of the world’s entire oil trade.

The Arabs of Arabistan supported the replacement of the Shah by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the establishment of an Islamic Republic, but ended up disappointed.

Most of his fellow Arabs were illiterate, Towfiq complained, workhorses made to toil for their Iranian bosses: “We are very rich in resources, but it is taken away from Arabistan.” Only a handful of Arabs worked in the Iranian civil service; no Arab rose above the rank of captain in the armed forces. Fascinated by foreign culture, hungry for learning, Towfiq won a place to study English language and literature at the University of Tehran. “I am a rare case,” he said. “Out of four million people, we are only four thousand university graduates.” There he eagerly joined the students demonstrating against the shah.

But the ayatollah was no more willing than the shah to countenance self-government for oil-rich Khuzestan. Arabs were not the only ethnic minority agitating for greater self-determination. Kurds, Turkmens, Azeris, and Baluchis all sought to loosen Tehran’s grip, some by democratic means, others through violence. If the Arabs won autonomy, other groups would demand the same, threatening the very integrity of the country. “The new leaders forgot all their promises,” said Towfiq. The ayatollah clamped down on the Arabs, just as the shah had done.

Saddam Hussein, de facto ruler of Iraq since 1968 and president since 1979, spotted an opportunity in the unrest. A secular nationalist with pretensions to lead the Arab world, Saddam saw Iran’s aggressive new theocracy as a threat to his power and ambitions. Inciting rebellion among the Arabs of neighboring Khuzestan was an easy and cheap way to undermine the ayatollah and destabilize Iran, while also demonstrating Saddam’s credentials as an Arab champion. Bands of Iranian Arabs were trained in Iraq, armed, and sent back across the border to attack police stations, military checkpoints, roads, bridges, and above all the oil pipelines carrying Iran’s economic lifeblood. These Arab guerrillas saw themselves as fighters for independence, but they were dependent on Saddam Hussein, pawns cynically manipulated by the Iraqi leader for his own ends.

The conflict was racial as well as political, an ethnic confrontation between indigenous Arabs and Farsi-speaking Iranians introduced by the shahs to Persianize the region. Iranian militiamen flown in from Tehran roamed the streets in search of insurgents. Some fought back. Armed Arabs attacked a naval base, the central police station, government buildings, and shops. Three days of street fighting left 220 people dead and 600 wounded. The ayatollah’s secret police, the successors to SAVAK and no less vicious, set about hunting down Arab activists, many of whom were tried in hastily convened Revolutionary Courts and summarily executed. Ayatollah Sheikh Muhammad-Taher al-Khaqani, spiritual leader of the region’s Arabs and Khomeini’s former teacher, was arrested, along with hundreds of others. Those who escaped fled to Iraq or went into hiding.

The British have to figure out what to do, difficult since they didn’t have a significant stake in the fight and the European track record of dealing with Arab/Muslim terrorists wasn’t great:

In 1972, Palestinian terrorists of the Black September group seized Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympic Games. The West German handling of that incident had been a disaster, ending in the deaths of all the hostages and most of the terrorists.

Looking at the UK today, it’s tough to imagine that Margaret Thatcher ever existed, but of course she did.

As always, Thatcher made her opinions abundantly clear: she had “no intention of allowing terrorists to succeed in their hostage-taking,” as she wrote in her memoirs. “This was no less an attempt to exploit perceived Western weakness than was the hostage-taking of the American Embassy personnel in Tehran.” The Iron Lady was not for turning, in this or any other way, and her mind was already made up. “My policy would be to do everything possible to resolve the crisis peacefully, without unnecessarily risking the lives of the hostages, but above all that terrorism should be—and should be seen to be—defeated.” In any case, the gunmen were demanding something she could not deliver: the release of political prisoners in another, hostile country. The terrorists, whoever they were and whatever the eventual outcome, had committed a crime on British soil, and would be tried under English law.

Thatcher is just the sort of person to call in the SAS (Special Air Service) and a lot of the book covers the glorious history, training, and capabilities of the SAS (tough to imagine today given that the UK has been conquered without a shot having been fired).

The book goes into a lot of detail about the evolution of the relationship among five groups of people (1) hostage takers, (2) Iranian diplomats, (3) Iranian employees of the embassy who weren’t necessarily passionate about the Islamic regime, (4) visitors to the embassy, e.g., from Syria and Pakistan, (5) a few white British people. Most of them can find common ground in shared hatred of Israel/Jews and the hostage takers begin to soften when they realize that, with a couple of exceptions, the hostages aren’t tightly coupled to the new Islamic government in Iran.

Without giving too much of the story away, let me highlight that at least one of the hostage takers survived and was imprisoned.

Nejad was finally released in 2008, having served twenty-seven years. In Iran, he still faced murder charges for the deaths of Lavasani and Samadzadeh. Tehran gave no assurances he would not be tortured and executed if repatriated. He was therefore allowed to remain in the UK, a decision described by Iran as “condemnable and indefensible.” Fowzi Nejad now lives in the UK.

In other words, British law requires that the British welcome as a neighbor a foreigner who was convicted of one of the most spectacular crimes in modern British history. Prior to the siege of the embassy, he had never been to the UK. He traveled to the UK only to commit the crime of taking hostages. He never claimed to have any affinity for British culture, other than its perceived softness on terrorists, or the British people.

More: Read The Siege.

Arabistan/Kuzestan:

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Meet at Sun ‘n Fun tomorrow?

Who wants to meet at Sun ‘n Fun tomorrow? I’m flying into Bartow tonight (I have some commitments here in Palm Beach County and wasn’t sure that I could make the 7 pm cutoff for Lakeland) and will ignominiously approach the event in an Avis Toyota Camry. Fly the mighty Cirrus back out on Saturday after a stop at Bok Tower Gardens, the polar opposite of Sun n’ Fun (photo from March 2022):

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When can we get a DOGE for aviation?

We had a 0-time Continental factory rebuilt engine dropped into a 2005 Cirrus SR20 back in 2019. The steel oil filler cap was new at the time. After 5.5 years of operation, in which combustion generated water vapor as a byproduct, the cap rusted out to the point that it is missing one of the teeth that engages spring tension to keep it in place.

Some pilots remove the cap after every flight for some period of time to let the steam out, though quite a few of these heroes of diligence also report having suffered from rusted oil filler caps. You might reasonably ask why anyone should care about the lifetime of this part. Why not buy a new cap every 5 years? An impervious-to-rust (plastic) ACDelco GM oil filler cap is $11 (presumably this is because people sometimes lose the caps, not because the cap won’t outlast the engine in ordinary circumstances). How much more could an aviation cap cost? (Answer: $386-$11)

I talked to some aviation mechanics about this and none thought that there would be any problem in Continental or Lycoming catching up on 70+ years of improvements in plastic or taking a class titled “Here are some things that Ford, Toyota, and GM were doing in 1985”. The best explanation that anyone had of why this expensive and rust-prone part would be used is that the engine family was certified like this back in the 1930s and it is too much effort to get the FAA to sign off on a change.

Maybe general aviation will be saved by eVTOLs that are designed and built with a completely different philosophy. If not, though, I wonder if we could get a DOGE going between the manufacturers of legacy piston engines/aircraft and the FAA to ask and answer questions of the form “Why wouldn’t you use a plastic cap in a rust-prone environment?”

3D printing nerds: have we advanced to the point that it is possible to toss a metal cap into a scanner and print a dimensionally identical plastic replacement that can handle the temps at the top of the engine (the oil temperature redline is 240F so maybe you want a plastic that is good to 400F)?

For reference, here is the perfect-condition oil filler cap, never previously touched or used by anyone other than the dealer, in our 4.3-year-old Honda Odyssey:

It’s available for $13.49, including shipping, from a Honda dealer via Amazon. If we assume that shipping is bundled into the price, this is a $10 part at most. Why did people replace it? Here are a couple of Amazon review reasons:

  • The original cap began to leak around its base after 8 years and 60K miles.
  • Don’t know what happened to my oil filler cap?

Searching for incidents across all cars where an oil filler cap was replaced, and ignoring those where the cap serves an engine venting or emissions function, it seem as though loss is the most common reason and typically due to a service shop forgetting to put it back on.

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Robots that exterminate immigrant plants and animals?

We’re informed by Science that immigrant humans make life better/easier for natives (the enrichers and the enriched). Science also tells us that immigrant plants and animals make life extremely difficult if not impossible for natives. Examples from the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, Florida:

What about robots that tirelessly hunt for immigrants that Science says we don’t want and that Californians characterize as “invaders”? They could catch Burmese pythons in the Everglades, for example. Sea robots could hunt lionfish in the Caribbean and Asian carp in the Great Lakes (folks in Illinois hate Asians almost as much as Harvard does!). The idea is already out there for immigrant plants (e.g., “Seeing Beneath the Trees: Using Robots and AI to Control Understory Invasive Plants” (UConn 2021)) and “weeds”. Maybe nobody wants to think about robots, such as Elon Musk’s Optimus, having the power to trap and gather live animals (or kill them).

This is my April Fools’ Day message. It can fit the theme of the day either because (1) we are all fools for not noticing the apparent contradiction in simultaneously believing that low-skill immigrant humans are hugely valuable and animal immigrants are hugely destruction, (2) the idea of robots roaming the Everglades and gathering up baskets of pythons is foolish.

Related… “Densely packed invasive anoles outcompete natives”:

Invasive brown anoles might outcompete their native cousins in the southeastern U.S. merely by living more densely.

Brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) inadvertently came to Florida in the 1800s by tagging along on cargo shipments. Since then, the invasive species have moved steadily northward in the state, often taking over territories occupied by native green anoles (Anolis carolinensis). Researchers know that over time, the invasive Cuban anoles change the native species’ habits. After moving in, the newcomer species typically occupies the ground and lower parts of plants and trees, while the green anoles occupy an ecological niche higher up on trees and bushes. The native anoles also become less common once the brown anoles have established themselves in the new territory.

Instead, she speculated that brown anoles in the wild might be outcompeting green anoles based on sheer numbers. Brown anoles may lay eggs more often than green anoles. The Cuban newcomers also tolerate much denser living conditions, while green anoles don’t. This allows the invasive species to take over more territory.

In short, anole migrants have a higher birth rate and don’t mind living in squalid conditions that native anoles would consider intolerable…

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The Last Breath (Hollywood version)

Back in 2019, I watched a documentary about a diving accident (see Movie: The Last Breath). This year, I watched the Hollywood version. It’s the same director, but upgraded to meet the diversity quotas imposed by Hollywood for Oscar eligibility:

It’s difficult for three guys to have sex with each other while hundreds of feet down under the North Sea, so an Academy-approved LGBTQ+ theme was not going to be possible. The real-life individuals in this drama all appear to be white males (Scottish and English; see photo below (source), though perhaps David Yuasa has some Asian heritage). The filmmakers nimbly substitute an East Asian guy as one of the divers, a Maori actor as the captain, and a female as the ship’s first officer (maybe these last two aren’t doing their respective victimhood groups any image favors given that it was entirely the ship’s fault). I don’t think that it helped Oscar eligibility, but they put an American actor (Woody Harrelson) with an American accent in as one of the Scottish divers.

The dramatization is more dramatic and has much higher production values than the documentary (which includes a lot of 2012 footage from the ship, the ROV, etc.).

I recommend the movie. There’s not too much colorful language, especially considering how dire the situation got, and there is no sex despite the Academy’s attempt to make everything LGBTQ+. Therefore, our 9-year-old didn’t learn anything new about things that we don’t want him to learn about.

Related:

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Eid Mubarak from Apple

Eid al-Fitr is now a “US Holiday” according to Apple:

(Separately, nobody can write precisely precisely?)

How about some new phrases, e.g., “As American as Eid al-Fitr”?

(Eid al-Fitr is not on the analogous Google Calendar “Holidays in the United States”. Hatefully, neither Apple nor Google includes International Transgender Day of Visibility (March 31 every year) on the list of US Holidays.)

Related:

  • Profiles in Corporate Courage (Apple offered Pride Edition products in 2021 and “is proud to support LGBTQ advocacy organizations”, but at the same time does not offer these sacred rainbow items in places where full LGBTQ rights have already been achieved, e.g., in the UAE (Wokipedia 2021: “Male homosexuality is illegal in the UAE, and is punishable by the death penalty under sharia law”))
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Is the Sacred Rainbow Flag the new Golden Calf?

Today is the big day for the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County:

Here’s the organization’s “Inclusivity Statement”:

Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County embraces a culture of diversity and inclusivity in accordance with our Jewish values. We celebrate the uniqueness of our community members, lay partners and staff as varied perspectives enrich our learning and reinforce our commitment to making the world a better place. We aim to create an accessible environment that accommodates individual needs and welcomes the full participation of our community. Learn more at jewishpb.org/inclusivity.

I’m wondering why attending a Pride parade is a specifically Jewish activity, especially in light of Leviticus 20:13. My conclusion is that the Sacred Rainbow Flag is to modern-day Jews (at least the non-Deplorables) what the Golden Calf was to ancient Israelites.

Update… let’s look at a few photos. From the Palm Beach Post

A child on the sidelines…

… learns that the Future is Trans:

The 2SLGBTQQIA+ religion is not promoted in public schools, but the public school police department actually paraded in the parade:

Here’s a T-shirt from the “Jewish Dems” and, apparently, the trans-enhanced rainbow flag is something everyone at the intersection of Judaism and the Democratic Party could agree on back in 2023:

Loosely related, a tweet from Tim Cook, who identifies as a member of the 2SLGBTTQIA+ community, today:

What is the traditional way for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community to celebrate Eid al-Fitr?

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Should cars be able to signal a U-turn?

Compared to Maskachusetts, Florida is the land of the divided thoroughfare, dedicated left turn lane, and legal U-turn. It’s a little tough for people making a right turn on red on the cross street, though, to determine if a driver is making a left turn (no conflict) or a U-turn (conflict).

Now that all of the exterior lights of a car are LED, why not a mechanism for signaling a U-turn to other drivers? The rear left turn signal could add an extra color and a “U” symbol that lights up in between flashes (there’s already an array of LEDs that make up the “taillight”, right?) The front turn signal, seen by the right-turning driver (above), could add the same standard extra color.

Perhaps the toughest part is the gesture to activate the U-turn signal. The stalk is already heavily overloaded with user interface (pull back for temporary bright headlights; push forward for persistent bright headlights). Maybe a steering wheel button?

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