World: The City as a Battlefield: A Global Concern

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stood at one or the other of two extremes: "strict, cruel and unjust or weak, vacillating, ineffective or absent altogether." The son grows up hating the father, and learning to take on the cop, capitalism and the Establishment. He can, says Wahl, even murder without guilt. Many revolutionaries suffer from searing feelings of inadequacy, Wahl adds, and therefore have a greater-than-ordinary need for notoriety. Supporting this view, De Paul University Psychologist Thomas Milburn speaks of the "Icarus complex" among many terrorists—"even though you fall to earth, you've tried one spectacular thing."

The Palestinian skyjackers, Historian Sharabi insists, are not suffering from psychic hang-ups, but from such despondency that "literally any means is justified by the end." Leila Khaled, the P.F.L.P.'s almond-eyed, two-time skyjacker, is a case in point. When Leila and an accomplice attempted to seize an El Al 707 in September, they were stopped cold by gunfire from El Al guards (Leila's companion was killed). Now back in Beirut, where she cuts a modish figure in floppy hats and close-fitting slacks, Leila is downright indignant about the El Al security men. "They had no sense of responsibility," she complained to TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott last week. "Bullets were flying all over the cabin. They were completely ruthless."

As far as her own actions are concerned, Miss Khaled told Correspondent Scott: "If we throw bombs, it is not our responsibility. You may care for the death of a child, but the whole world ignored the death of Palestinian children for 22 years. We are not responsible."

Double Danger

How should governments deal with the urban guerrilla threat? Brazil's tough response has put all but a few fanatics out of the terror business, and it is not hard to see why. "When we invade a terrorist cell," explained one Brazilian official last week, "we use twice the force necessary. We make a demonstration so overwhelming that the people know there is absolutely no way out." Off-duty police and troops have also formed unofficial "death squads" to search out and eliminate known terrorists.

Canada and Uruguay have moved decisively, but within constitutional limits, knowing full well that to scrap the constitution à la Brazil would only play into the terrorists' hands by inviting real disorders. In Ottawa, Trudeau's Cabinet is already drawing up new laws to replace the War Measures Act, so as to permit more effective action against civil disorders. With its May 1968 upheaval in mind, France has beefed up its police force, and enacted a tough new anti-demonstration measure known as the "anti-wrecker's law." Under the law, police can arrest anyone standing in sight of an unlawful demonstration.

Compared to some of these foreign countermeasures against urban guerrillas, the U.S. is still proceeding mildly, all the loose talk about "repression" notwithstanding. Certainly, given the present political climate in the U.S., no American President could have invoked wartime powers as easily as Trudeau did to summarily outlaw a group of militant dissidents. In the U.S., officials can move strongly against an urban guerrilla threat under the recently enacted Organized Crime Control Law; among other things