Jillian Becker has spent decades studying terrorists. Not, like media-left darling Waleed Aly, by sitting on a pile of taxpayer funding and writing furrowed-browed Jeremiads about how awful white people are to Muslims. No, the South African Jewish journalist actually risked her neck, gaining the trust of the likes of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, or picking through bloodstained documents in the rubble of PLO headquarters in Lebanon.
All of that risk and invaluable research led to books like Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang and The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Even more importantly, Becker founded The Institute for the Study of Terrorism, which included a vast archive of primary documents of terrorism.
But the Institute was closed down for lack of funding a decade before 9/11. Its archive was handed over the University of Leicester — and disappeared.
Two years ago, the University of Leicester informed a Republican activist seeking information about the archive that they had no idea where it was. An extensive search turned up nothing.
A response from a sociology professor informed her that the university, “prioritises collections in their care which are most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching”, that a search for “material relating to the IST proved inconclusive” and that any material from the Institute for the Study of Terrorism “located in future will be appraised by a professionally-qualified archivist and, if appropriate, transferred to the care of our University Archives and Special Collections.”
This isn’t just a coincidence, poor record-keeping or cost-cutting. It’s a deliberate drive by the woke left to erase history. Not coincidentally, most of the material shows the inextricable links between terrorism and Marxist ideology. Including the links between terrorist groups and, not just the defunct Soviet Union, but communist China.
While the University of Leicester can’t find the archive documenting Communist atrocities, its librarians promote the original papers of Karl Marx, materials from the Marx Memorial library, and rhapsodize about the ongoing process of digitizing issues of the Daily Worker.
One librarian excitedly promotes the fact that “the British Library has a digital copy of parts of the original Communist Manifesto – only 26 are believed to have survived worldwide!”
The University of Leicester has had no trouble retaining a special collection of socialist and anarchist memorabilia from the 19th century that includes notes and handbills. Or an oral interview with a Communist party member, and other leftist ephemera which have been painstakingly preserved even while the archive indicting Communism has disappeared.
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When the University says it “prioritises collections in their care which are most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching”, Becker says, that’s tantamount to a confession. Like most of academia, the University is only interested in promoting long-failed Marxist doctrines — and erasing the evidence of the repeated, violent, bloody history of the left.
Those who don’t or won’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Repeating the carnage of communism is, it seems, very much what Western academics very much want.
And they’ll destroy any amount of books to make it happen.