Editor’s note: In a recent article (Terror remembrances of bombs past) from Canada’s Globe and Mail, London correspondent Doug Saunders draws parallels between 70’s era urban guerrillas like the Weathermen, SLA, and Red Army Faction and today’s Islamic jihadists. As Saunders writes, “violent leftist revolution was a Seventies fashion… violent Islamism may be the same.” GNN’s Stephen Marshall, just back from Pakistan where he completed principal photography on his upcoming feature documentary HolyWars, argues Saunders couldn’t be more wrong:

As someone who has spent the past two years filming in countries like Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, with a specific focus on infiltrating jihadist groups, I found Saunders’ Islamism article to be shockingly off the mark. There is simply no basis for comparing today’s Muslim terrorists/insurgents to the 70’s era urban guerrillas. And to do so isn’t only historically inaccurate but also extremely dangerous as it seriously deludes the public about the very real threat posed by these groups.

Let’s be clear. The Weathermen, SLA, and Red Army Faction drew their inspiration from Marxist/Maoist revolutionaries who were operating in fascist or colonial societies. Vastly different than the democratic political systems – namely Germany and the U.S. – these “bomb-making university grads” were attempting to disrupt. To illustrate, let’s take just two of their major inspirations: Cuba’s Che Guevara and Brazil’s Jose Marighella. Each of which achieved very different results, which should have been instructive for the would-be revolutionaries.

Guevara (and Castro) ultimately won critical public support for their Cuban revolution, which was supported through a network of rural peasant communities who had had enough of their Spanish masters. And even after the revolution, Cubans generally backed the murderous tactics deployed by Guevara in the name of halting counter-revolutionaries. But the case of Marighella, who’s Manual for the Urban Guerrilla became the playbook for the First World upstarts, is more instructive. He was fighting against a vicious US-backed military dictatorship in Brazil and his blueprint for revolution was based on the propaganda of the deed. Unlike the Cubans, insurgents in Sao Paolo – with its population of 8 million – could not zip out to the countryside for rest and supplies after a big fight against the fascists. So Marighella wrote his Manual with precise instructions on assassinations, bank robberies and bombings – all of which, he hoped, would serve to inspire and energize the citizenry, galvanizing them into a mass revolt against the dictatorship. Of course, he was wrong. The people were too terrorized to do anything of the sort and Marighella was killed after two priests were tortured into giving up his whereabouts.

It’s one thing to hatch these ideas while living under intolerable conditions. It’s quite another to cut-and-paste them into a liberal democratic paradigm. The reason the Weathermen and their ilk faded out so fast was because they had zero public sympathy, were (for the most part) buffoons, and were essentially operating in a vacuum.

Not so with the jihadists. It would be nice to think, as Saunders does, that the “mood will dissolve.” But the reality is that it won’t. Unlike the SLA and Weathermen, who were using violence to sway a population living in a functionally democratic society, jihadists are fighting against (real or perceived) US-backed military dictatorships (Pakistan), sanctioned torture that breaches the Geneva Conventions (Guantanamo), terrorizing of indigenous Muslim populations by US-backed allies (Israel), genocide (Clinton’s sustained bombing and sanctions of Iraq which allegedly killed over 500,000), occupation of Muslim land and looting of resources (Iraq), and even the overthrow of democratically elected governments (Algeria). Now I don’t know how much traveling Saunders has done outside London, but he doesn’t need to go much further than the East end to find large groups of extremely angry Muslim men and women who will cite any of the above as justifications for the jihad. And it’s getting worse.

I spent time with members of the now-disbanded radical group al-muhajiroun, many of whom have since been arrested under Britain’s tough new anti-terror laws for non-violent crimes. One man, Abdul Muhid, got 4 years for holding up a (violently worded) banner at the London cartoon rally. While I can’t argue with the public’s clamor for action against the agitantes, the British are actually radicalizing their own Muslims with these kinds of clampdowns faster than the occupations of Iraq and (the unholy mess that is) Afghanistan. Remember, the 7/7 bombers weren’t the crazy-eyed protesters like Muhid and his group. No, they were quiet, middle class kids. And the 2007 Glasgow attack? Mild-mannered doctors.

Are Saunders and I reading the same newspapers?

Now go a little farther out of the bubble… try Jenin in the occupied territories where I spent some time with Zakaria Zubeidi, leader of the al Aqsa brigades, who has to turn away widows and young men who want to be martyrs. Or maybe to Jakarta where I rolled with Ustadz Farign, who hosted al-Zawahiri when he came to plot 9/11 and whose entire family has dedicated itself to overthrowing the vastly corrupt, ultraviolent secular government of Indonesia. I filmed a training camp with over 20 young boys, all highly intelligent, rational students, who want to turn Indonesia’s archipelago into a base for al Qaeda to destroy American imperialism.

Or, finally, Pakistan, where I was shooting up until 2 days before Bhutto’s assassination. I had traveled there with Khalid Kelly, another member of Britain’s banned al-Muhajiroun. Kelly cannot return home for fear of arrest and has not seen his sons Osama (yes, named after his hero) and the newborn Muhammed (now the second most popular boys name in Britain) for months. We crossed into the NWFP and were in a nearby village when Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, the Interior Minister and confidante of General Musharaf, was targeted by a suicide attack in his mosque on the Muslim celebration of Eid. Suicide attacks, once unheard of in Pakistan, have now become standard in the guerrilla war against the military. With the (impossible) dream of controlling a nuclear Pakistan, many jihadists see Pakistan as the most important battleground in the new century. Imagine how it is for ordinary Pakistanis, who just want to live their lives in peace and prosperity, when America’s new MLK, Barack Obama, declares his intent to unilaterally deal with Pakistan if they do not get their house in order. When it is precisely the lie of “American democracy” that has enabled a dictatorship in their land and emboldened the jihadists liberals like Obama want to stop!

Now, as a Canadian living in the United States, I am wary of the neo-conservative propaganda that seeks to amplify, and indeed, exaggerate the jihadi threat. But I am equally concerned about those who underplay it either out of reactionaryism or sheer ignorance. All it does is serve to disarm the public in the face a frighteningly real danger, one which we desperately need to address as a global community if we are going to avoid successive (and more devastating than 9/11) terrorist attacks. More, it proves the point that people in the West, in who’s name soldiers are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, have no grasp on what this fight is truly about.

GNN co-founder Stephen Marshall is author of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: The New Liberal Menace in America. His new film, HolyWars, is now in post-production.