I wish this book were not so timely. Recall just a few events from 2004:
Spanish trains, a school and two jet-liners in Russia, an embassy in
Indonesia, and a stream of murder videos too indistinguishable and too
numbing to count have all blackened the news.

How do we as individuals, as informed citizens, confront the hard reality
of religion-fueled terror attacks? One way - Jessica Stern's favored
approach - is to look the phenomenon squarely in the eye and seek to
understand it in all its ragged and unsettling details. In this book, she
interviews adherents of several extreme Christian, Jewish, and Islamic
groups to find the common elements, the seductive forces that pull people of divergent backgrounds into violent acts.

A world expert on terrorism, Stern is a Harvard lecturer, a former
National Security Council member, and a past superterrorism Fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations. She’s traveled from Arkansas to Indonesia
interviewing terrorists – some in prisons, others in their strongholds –
about their goals and how they structure their operations.

Stern’s narratives offer answers to surprising questions: What does a
terrorist leader’s home look like? How does he treat his wife and kids?
What should one wear to visit an armed radical Islamist compound
(especially if one is a Jewish woman professor from the West)? What kind
of work could a man do if he quit a terrorist cell? Where do armed
militants go when their original conflicts end or they’re pushed out by a
superior force?

Early in her book, Stern states that the U.S. generally does a poor job
distinguishing between empathy and sympathy. The former entails getting
inside the heads of dangerous terrorists in order to counter their actions
whereas the latter crosses the line and bleeds into actual support for
their violence. According to Stern, our justified aversion to sympathy has
led us to employ too little empathy and to make too few attempts at
learning how terrorists think. The final and most provocative section of
her book gives recommendations for how U.S. policy could more effectively use such deep understanding to improve its attempts to suppress terrorism and ultimately win the hearts and minds of the communities that give rise to it.

In today’s world, we often witness the reality of terrorism, but only
rarely are we called to look beneath its surface to gain a better
understanding of its roots and motive forces. Written with sophistication
and empathy, empathy in its best sense, Stern's book is one such rare
call.

Review by Mark Bradshaw, November 25, 2004
 

Read here for a review of Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers by Barbara Victor:

http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0904-009.html

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