"He called it 'revolutionary suicide.'"

I posted some time ago about Congressman Leo Ryan, who was murdered in 1978 on an airstrip in Guyana as prelude to the Rev. Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid massacre. Scott James of the Bay Citizen section of the New York Times has a scary addendum to the shocking story. Jones apparently had a 9/11-style act of terrorism in mind. An excerpt:

“Twenty-five years before the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, a religious extremist plotted to hijack a commercial airliner — filled with 200 or so unsuspecting passengers — and deliberately crash it.

The target was San Francisco. And the would-be perpetrator was not a jihadist, but the man who would become one of history’s more infamous villains: the cult leader Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, whose headquarters was then on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco.

With the hijacking plot, described in a coming book and recently confirmed by a former Peoples Temple leader, Mr. Jones is said to have wanted to cause death on a scale that the world would not soon forget. He called it ‘revolutionary suicide,’ a warped vision of religious martyrdom he would ultimately fulfill two years later, in 1978, with cyanide poisonings and shootings in Jonestown, Guyana, that left 918 people — most of them church members — dead.”

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There were 918 dead but some survivors: