TEXT B Stern recounts her
four-year odyssey into the hearts and minds of religious terrorists. She talks
to Christian, Jewish and Muslim extremists, violent anti-abortion warriors and
admirers of Timothy McVeigh, and discovers how much they have in common. Nothing
she finds leads the reader to suppose that any of the religious faiths is
inherently more prone to violence than the other: the problem is not the words
on the page, but how they are read. A rough social template can
be extrapolated from Stern’s account: the leaders of such groups tend to have
much younger, attractive and submissive wives who support their views; long
hair, robes, veils and conspicuous deference are popular in all three faiths.
The leaders tend to live in comfortable houses and enjoy the trappings of their
power: large cars, acolytes and bodyguards. They talk in generalities about the
justice of their cause and the Almighty’s firm support. Those who serve as
cannon fodder, on the other hand, are likely to be young, vulnerable, socially
disadvantaged and poorly educated, and to have a sense of personal or collective
humiliation. Violence for the cause gives them a feeling of purpose, dignity and
the transcendent experience of serving, and perhaps dying for, ideals that they
regard as pure. With faith, the weak become strong, the selfish become
altruistic, and rage turns to conviction. If some of this sounds
predictable, it is not to diminish the interest of Stern’s account. A leading
expert On terrorism and a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard, she has tracked down and interviewed an impressive range of activists
in a variety of causes from Florida to Kashmir. On a subject that tends to be
richer in rhetoric than in detail, a writer able and willing to get this close
is hard to find. These are not always profoundly penetrating
encounters: there is an implicit bargain-- which Stern readily acknowledges-that
if you are allowed across the threshold it is bemuse your interlocutor has an
agenda that he imagines will be furthered. Terrorists need people to notice what
they do and, for reasons of fund-raising and recruitment, want to convince a
wider circle that the cause is just. Perhaps Stem’s critics would deem this a
reason to stay away, but they would be wrong. She is a levelheaded investigator
whose knowledge of the background of groups like these adds perspective to her
interviews. A feeling of complete certainty, let alone absolute
purity, is hard to come by in the examined life. To foster the conviction that
God supports the murder of innocents requires a tightknit group and a settled
hatred of the Other: in these circles, whites hate blacks and Jews; Jews and
Christians hate Muslims and vice versa; anti-abortion crusaders hate
gynecologists. All of them seem to have it in for homosexuals and most, even the
Americans, bate contemporary America. Tolerance and women’s rights, as Stern
observes, are irritating to those left behind by modernity.
Avigdor Eskin, a millenarian Jew, believes, rather against the evidence,
that the United States is conspiring to destroy Israel. To meet him, Stern, who
is careful to share this kind of detail, dressed in a long skirt, long sleeves
and a scarf that covered her hair, neck and shoulders completely an outfit that
would have been equally de rigueur for a meeting with a strict Muslim. And as
Eskin himself volunteers, they resemble each other in more than their dress
code: "Here in Israel, we don’t like to say this very loudly, but the radical
right Jewish groups have a lot in common with Hamas." Both, Stern adds, have
twin political and religious objectives and both use selective readings of
religious texts and of history to justify violence over territory.
If to the outsider the manners are similar, each group believes itself to
be uniquely favored by the Almighty, and each individual follows his own
trajectory. A Palestinian suicide bomber might be suffering from what Stern
describes as the epidemic of despair that afflicts his people. An American
Identity Christian who was sickly as a child still burns with the humiliation of
being made to join a girls’gym class at school. A young madrasah student in
Pakistan says that the day he came to the religious school was the first time in
his life he had enough food to eat or clothes to wear; two of his fellow pupils
tell her that education and wealth are the two greatest threats to their
cause. The argument is often a fight about land and resources
expressed through the powerful ideologies of identity. Some groups-the
mujaheddin who fought in Afghanistan or the Muslim warriors in Indonesia--were
created by state security services but have now escaped from control. Most enjoy
ample funds and money has become, for many, a reason for continuing the
war. In between her interviews, Stern offers a cogent analysis
of methodologies and structures: she distinguishes between lone-wolf avengers
and organizations with hierarchies of command, between networks, franchises and
freelances, between inspirational leaders and leaderless resistance. She lays
out the impact of the post-9/11 war on terror on organizations like Al Qaeda and
confirmed my suspicion that both the rhetoric and the reality of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan have boosted their numbers without crippling their capacity
to harm. To fight today’s terrorism with an army is like trying to shoot a cloud
of mosquitoes with a machine gun. The hard part, of course, is
what to do instead. Stern describes how winner-take-all globalization provokes
powerful resentment in a wide range of communities. Failed states, weak or
tyrannical governments, social deprivation, arbitrary use of power and a
perception of injustice--all help generate recruits. The Internet and the easy
availability of weapons helps empower the discontented. On an individual level,
though, why one true believer in search of a transcendent experience should
become a saint and another a terrorist seems to be chance: it can come down to
the wrong company at the vulnerable moment. On a global scale, Stern ventures
some general policy advice, without claiming to offer a solution. As a
description of the problem, though, this is a serious and provocative
beginning. The writer comments on Stem’s investigation and analysis in a ______ tone.