Jillian Becker
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Jillian Becker | |
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| Born | 2 June 1932 Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Pen name | Jillian Becker |
| Nationality | British |
| Citizenship | Britain and United States |
| Education | BA |
| Alma mater | University of the Witwatersrand |
| Notable works | Hitler's Children, The Keep, The PLO |
| Notable awards | Pushcart Prize |
| Website | |
| www | |
Jillian Becker (born 2 June 1932[1] is a South African-born British author, journalist, and lecturer. She specialises in research about terrorism, having written Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (1977), among other works.
Life
Her father, Dr Bernard Friedman, was a South African surgeon and politician who co-founded the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. Becker attended Roedean School in Johannesburg. At the age of 14 she won first prize in a national essay competition on the evils of race-discrimination set by the (anti-apartheid) Institute of Race Relations.
She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand where she made a lifelong platonic friendship with the scientist, Lewis Wolpert and the writer, Lionel Abrahams. She left her first husband, Michael Geber, in South Africa to live in Italy with her second husband, Gerry Becker, later moving to Mountfort Crescent off Barnsbury Square, in London. It was here that Becker's friend, Sylvia Plath, came to stay with her young children in the days immediately before Plath committed suicide and it is here that Becker's book about Plath's last days, Giving Up is based. Becker has been a British citizen since 1960.[1][2]
She had two marriages which ended in divorce, succeeded by a long relationship with Bernhard Adamczewski who filled the triple role of co-director of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism, computer manager and explosives expert, having become qualified in the use of explosives when he had worked in the South African gold mines in the 1950s. The marriages produced three daughters and six grandchildren.
Becker is on the council of the Freedom Association.[3] She lives in California.[4]
She is the manager and editor of The Atheist Conservative blog.[5] She is a lifelong friend of the atheist scientist, Lewis Wolpert, and she knew and frequently corresponded with the famous atheist philosopher, Antony Flew, and the Irish artist husband and wife pair, Philip and Barry Castle. Indeed, Barry painted a portrait of Becker and Adamczewski.[citation needed] A series of biographical sketches about southern African writers she has known, such as Doris Lessing and Lionel Abrahams and others has been published in the New English Review in 2020.[6]
A lecture series titled The Jillian Becker Annual Lecture was launched under the auspices of The Freedom Association in 2018. The invited lecturers are required to speak on the general theme of the importance of individual freedom and/or of the nation-state.
Published works
Her early work is mostly fiction which was banned in her native South Africa, under the apartheid regime. Her short story "The Stench" received a Pushcart Prize.
She has written an account of the death of her friend, the poet Sylvia Plath, who stayed with Becker for the last weekend of her life.[7] Dissatisfied with the biographers' treatments and after seeing the film script to Sylvia (and declining the opportunity to have anything to do with the film), Becker decided to write her own account of Plath's death: Giving Up: the last days of Sylvia Plath.
Her most famous book, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, is about the German Red Army Faction. The book was chosen by Golo Mann as Newsweek (Europe) book of the year 1977[8] and serialised in newspapers in London, Oslo and Tokyo.
The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization was commissioned by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and published in 1984. Becker spent months in Lebanon during the war in which Israel drove the PLO out of that country. She claimed to have retrieved secret documents from ruins of bombed PLO office buildings and to have interviewed Lebanese of all denominations and Palestinians who had experienced PLO oppression, as well as supporters, members and leaders of the PLO.[9]
Other works include novels, short stories, and numerous contributions to periodicals. She has contributed to scholarly articles on terrorism in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Institute for the Study of Terrorism
 | This article may lend undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, or controversies. (June 2016) |
In the 1980s, Becker served in a multi-party working group to advise the British Parliament on measures to combat international terrorism. She was also consulted by the embassies of several countries affected by indigenous terrorist organisations, some of which were supported by foreign nation states. In many of these cases, terrorist activity was an aspect of proxy wars, or what Becker called "the hot spots of the Cold War".[10]
In 1985, with Lord Chalfont, a former minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, she founded the "Institute for the Study of Terrorism" (IST) of which she was executive director from 1985 to 1990. With Chalfont on the presiding council were Baroness Cox, who was then deputy speaker of the House of Lords, and Lord Orr-Ewing. The institute's International Advisory Council included experts in many Western countries on terrorism, security, weaponry, and geo-politics. In the Institute itself Becker worked with a small staff of researchers and translators. Bernhard Adamczewski was her co-director at IST.[10]
IST kept in close touch with the Bomb Disposal Unit of the Metropolitan Police and the Airport Police Authorities. On some occasions IST received information, for instance about the smuggling across international borders of explosive material, before it had been conveyed by official channels, and was able to alert the relevant authorities. Institute personnel undertook to test airport security by smuggling imitation bombs in luggage through international airports, and found it deficient.[citation needed]
The chief purpose of the institute was to gather intelligence about terrorist organisations and their membership, and keep the British Parliament and the media informed about them, countering the propaganda and exposing pretexts and lies put out by the violent organisations themselves.[11] IST commissioned expert studies of terrorist groups and distributed them to members of both Houses of Parliament, to newspapers, individual journalists, radio and television news channels, foreign embassies, Customs and Excise, police forces, military experts, and university departments. It also held seminars addressed by experts in relevant subjects from many countries in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Middle and Far East.
IST cooperated with the Institute for the European Defence and Strategic Studies, (set up by Peter Blaker, Baron Blaker) in the organisation of an international conference on defence at Windsor in 1986. Also, with the Faculty of Laws of the University of London, the Institute held an international conference in 1988 at Ditchley Park, the venue of many Anglo-American top-level conferences. The three-day event was opened by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd. One of the most important addresses was given by John Hermon, Chief of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
IST was a registered charity, supported mainly by charitable donations but also partly self-supporting by providing expert consultancy and supplying reports to private companies, such as those needing risk assessments when expanding into foreign countries.[citation needed]
In 1990 the institute was forced to close as many donors stopped their contributions, convinced that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Communist satellites in Eastern Europe, there would be no more internationally sponsored terrorism. Becker warned that terrorism, far from being over, would become an even greater menace in the coming years, but she failed to persuade donors of her point of view and so lost their support.
The archive of the institute was bought by the University of Leicester, and was one of the collections with which the Scarman Centre, a research facility for the Department of Criminology, was founded. (The Scarman Centre is now Leicester University Department of Criminology)
Books
Selected fiction
- Becker, Jillian (1971). The Keep. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-003204-8.
- Becker, Jillian (1971). The Union. London: Chatto and Windus. ISBN 0-7011-1625-0.
- Becker, Jillian (1986). The Virgins: A Novel. Cape Town: David Philip. ISBN 978-0-86486-050-7.
Non-fiction
- [[Becker, Jillian (1977). Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott. ISBN 978-0-397-01153-7.
- Becker, Jillian (1984). The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-78299-1.
- Becker, Jillian (2002). Giving up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. London: Ferrington. ISBN 978-1898490319.
References
- ^ a b "Sylvia Plath: Jillian Becker on the poet's last days". BBC News. 10 February 2010. Retrieved 9 March 2015.
- ^ "New Penguin Modern Classic: The Keep by Jillian Becker". Penguin Books South Africa. 29 September 2008.
- ^ The Freedom Association - Council and Supporters Archived 7 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Jillian Becker | Authors | Macmillan". Us.macmillan.com. Retrieved 20 June 2015.
- ^ "1. About us". The Atheist Conservative. 6 May 2009. Retrieved 17 November 2017.
- ^ "Jillian Becker".
- ^ "Sylvia Plath: Jillian Becker on the poet's last days". BBC News. 10 February 2013.
- ^ Alvarez, Alberto Martin; Tristán, Eduardo Rey (5 August 2016). Revolutionary Violence and the New Left: Transnational Perspectives. ISBN 9781317291374.
- ^ "The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization". Authorhouse.
- ^ a b "Becker, Jillian (Ruth) 1932-". Archived from the original on 14 November 2018. Retrieved 18 January 2016 – via HighBeam Research.
- ^ Malcher, Alan (1991). "The 1990s – the Decade of International Unrest?". The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles. 64 (3): 209–214. doi:10.1177/0032258X9106400305. S2CID 148950296.
- 1932 births
- Living people
- British non-fiction writers
- University of the Witwatersrand alumni
- Members of the Freedom Association
- Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom
- South African emigrants to the United Kingdom
- 20th-century British writers
- 21st-century British writers
- 20th-century British women writers
- 21st-century British women writers
- 20th-century British short story writers
- British historical fiction writers
- British writers
- 20th-century atheists
- 21st-century atheists
- Alumni of Roedean School, South Africa