Jillian Becker


Jillian Becker is a novelist, prize-winning story-writer, critic, journalist and lecturer, best known internationally as a writer, researcher, and authority on the subject of terrorism and a prominent atheist.

Life

Her father, Dr Bernard Friedman, was a South African surgeon and politician who co-founded the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. Becker says in book jacket biographies that she was "undereducated" at 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 Institute of Race Relations.
She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand where she made a lifelong platonic friendship with the scientist, Lewis Wolpert. 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.
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 IST, 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. She has appeared in numerous television broadcasts and been interviewed many times on radio: for instance she appeared with Yehudi Menuhin, Richard Clutterbuck and others in After Dark in December 1989. She lives in California.
She is the manager and editor of The Atheist Conservative blog. She is a lifelong friend of the atheist scientist, Lewis Wolpert, and she knew and frequently corresponded with the famous atheist philosopher, Antony Flew.
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. The inaugural lecture was given on March 24, 2018, at Bournemouth, UK, by Dr. Anthony Daniels, also known as Theodore Dalrymple. The title of his lecture was “Threats to Freedom”. The second lecture was delivered on November 28, 2019, by Douglas Carswell, former UKIP MP, its title being: "Cheer UP! Why The World Is Getting Better". The third lecture was delivered on February 3, 2020, by Professor Simon Heffer, historian, author, Sunday Telegraph columnist, atheist, on the necessity for freedom of speech, particularly in the universities.

Published works

Her early work is mostly fiction which was banned in her native South Africa, under the apartheid regime.
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. Dissatisfied with the biographers' treatments and after seeing the film script to Sylvia, Becker decided to write her own account of Plath's death: Giving Up: the last days of Sylvia Plath. Becker was also a friend and near neighbour of Douglas Cleverdon, whose wife, Nest, gave Becker spare clothes for Plath's children during the period just after the suicide was discovered. When her memoir The Last Days of Sylvia Plath was published in Britain in 2002, its revelations were the subject of a major feature by the Independent on Sunday, provoking both supportive and hostile comments. The printed correspondence brought to light new facts about the poet’s life.
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 book of the year 1977 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.
Other works include novels and short stories and numerous contributions to periodicals, such as Simone Weil: A Saint for our Time? She has written for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Salisbury Review, Encounter, The Quarterly Review,and Standpoint; and in the US, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Terrorism an international journal,The New English Review, and The New Criterion. She has contributed to scholarly articles on terrorism in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Institute for the Study of Terrorism

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".
In 1985, with Lord Chalfont, a former minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, she founded the "Institute for the Study of Terrorism" 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.
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.
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. 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, 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.
Jillian Becker was an invited speaker at the June 1984 "conference on Terrorism" organized by Binyamin Netanyahu’s Jonathan Institute in Washington, D.C., opened by Secretary of State George Shultz, and including UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Midge Decter, Edwin Meese, Jack Kemp, Lord Chalfont, historian Bernard Lewis, and columnists George Will and Charles Krauthammer.
When the coalition forces led by the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Becker was retained by The Telegraph to provide the newspaper with information and articles as required on terrorist groups and activities in the Middle East.
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.
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.
HBO, the American cable and satellite television network, entered into a contract with Becker and Adamczewski for a story of their terrorist-hunting days, and paid them a retainer each month during the period when the play was being commissioned and written. The writer chosen by HBO was the famous TV dramatist Lynda La Plante. She completed the play, but HBO came under new management and cancelled the production.
Cambridge Union Debate, Lent 1985, Jillian Becker leading for the motion. Opponent, Sir Malcolm Rifkind KCMG QC.
RADIO:
BBC:
World This Weekend World Service
The World Today
The World Tonight
Outlook
PM
24 Hours
World At One
Newsbeat
Woman’s Hour
Jimmy Young Show
African Service
German Service
LONDON BROADCASTING COMPANY
RADIO YELEFIS EIREANN:
OPINION
AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION
CANADIAN BRODACSTING CORPORATION
SOUTH AFRICAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION
ABC
ISRAEL RADIO
TELEVISION
BBC: Tonight
BBC: Panorama
BBC: After Dark
ITN
Bavarian Television
Canadian Television
ABC Television
West German Television, London
Radio Telefis Eireann, Television
Israel Television
South African Television: Weekly Magazine Current Affairs
Lectures at Universities, Colleges, Schools:
Brunel University
London University - Bedford College
Bramshill Police College
Hendon Police College
Loughborough Grammar School
St. Paul’s School for Girls
Francis Holland School for Girls
University of Kent at Canterbury
Oxford University St. Anthony’s College
Royal College of Defence Studies London
Conferences:
ISODARCO – Pugwash Conference – Ariccia, Italy,
Institute for International Scientific Exchange West Berlin
International Society for the Study of Comparative Public Law University College Cardiff, Wales,
Centre for Contemporary Studies London
PEN International
Convention Internationale sur le Terrorisme Paris Other speakers: Raymond Aron, Simone Veil, Vladimir Bukovsky
British Foreign and Commonwealth Office at Wiston House, Wilton Park, as Keynote speaker.
Hanns Seidel Stiftung Hamburg
Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies with the Institute for the Study of Terrorism Windsor Speakers included Jean Francois Revel, Roger Scruton, Paul Hollander.
Institute for the Study of Terrorism and Faculty of Laws of University College London Ditchley Park Oxfordshire as Co-chairman.
University of Pretoria after first democratic election as Keynote Speaker
Washington, D.C. Jonathan Institute Conference
Jillian Becker was member of an informal study group convened periodically at the House of Lords by the Baroness Cox to recommend means of countering propaganda in educational curricula.
In the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, Jillian Becker founded and edited "The Blue Angel", a monthly newspaper for the Conservative Party in Islington, London.
Invited participant Woman of the Year luncheon 1987

Books

Selected fiction

Lippincott New York 1977
Michael Joseph London 1977
2nd. Edition Panther London 1978
7 Other editions: Germany, France, Spain, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Japan
3rd. Edition Pickwick Books London 1989
Weidenfeld & Nicolson London 1984
St. Martin’s Press New York 1984
Ferrington London 2002
St. Martin’s Press New York 2003
As part-author
CONTEMPORARY TERROR: STUDIES IN SUB-STATE VIOLENCE ed. David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf Essay: CASE STUDY, FEDERAL GERMANY Macmillan London 1981
BRITISH PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM ed. Paul Wilkinson Essay: ANOTHER FINAL BATTLE ON THE STAGE OF HISTORY George Allen and Unwin London 1981
TERRORISM: HOW THE WEST CAN WIN ed. Benjamin Netanyahu Farrar Strauss and Girou Inc. New York 1986

Biographical and literary entries in reference works

Leading articles on the author and her work:
Der Spiegel; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Suddeitsche Zeitung; Daily Telegraph ; Time; New York Review of Books.
Interview with the author:
The Times, January 26, 1987
A characteristic of literary magazines in the 1950s, one that did not change much during the 1960s was the fact that these journals mainly published works by white writers. Contrast presented stories and poems by many of the most important white writers of this period. Among the contributors of fiction were Anthony Delius, Nadine Gordimer, Jenny Hobbs, Laurence Lerner, Ruth Miller, Alan Paton, and the editor, Jack Cope, himself. Cope, Gordimer, and Hobbs also wrote stories for the volumes edited by the PEN Club, which featured Lionel Abrahams, Perseus Adams, Stephen Gray, Geoffrey Haresnape, and Lewis Sowden as well. Finally, the best known writers who published short fiction in The Purple Renoster were Jillian Becker, Myrna Blumberg, Yvonne Burgess, and Barney Simon.
  • Contemporary Authors published by Thompson Gale