Terror in the Name of God

Jessica Stern, a terrorism scholar and lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, sets out to answer a question most academics avoid: She interviews terrorists directly. Over several years, she travels to Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, and Pakistan, meeting with extremists from Christianity, Islam, and Judaism to understand why people who claim religious motivations kill innocents. The result is a work structured in two parts: the first examining the grievances that drive individuals toward holy war, the second investigating how terrorist organizations function. Drawing on philosopher Hannah Arendt's concept of "banal" evil, Stern finds that the terrorists she meets are not monsters but ordinary people who love their families and pray yet have lost the ability to empathize with their victims.

Stern's project begins in 1998 with her first extended conversation with Kerry Noble, the former second-in-command of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), a violent cult in rural Arkansas that adhered to Christian Identity, a white-supremacist theology claiming Anglo-Saxons are the true Israel. CSA started as a religious fellowship, but its leader, James Ellison, gradually radicalized the group, declaring that Jews had declared war on the white race and that the Zionist Occupied Government must be overthrown. Ellison employed classic cult techniques: members burned family photographs, pooled earnings, cut off contact with the outside world, and adopted new identities. Noble, humiliated throughout childhood by physical weakness and frustrated ambitions, found that the cult's paramilitary structure made him feel strong for the first time. The group stockpiled weapons, including a large drum of cyanide intended for poisoning city water supplies. In 1985, 200 federal agents laid siege to the compound, and the cult surrendered after three days. Noble's transformation illustrates Stern's central argument that terrorist leaders exploit alienation and humiliation to create a new "killer self" in followers, a process psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton calls "doubling."

Stern frames the grievances that give rise to holy war as a collective-action problem. Terrorist leaders encourage participation through spiritual promises, emotional rewards, and material incentives. What most attracts people to militant religious groups, she contends, is how they simplify life: Good and evil become starkly defined, and martyrdom offers the ultimate escape from confusion and despair.

In Gaza, Stern examines how repeated humiliation under Israeli occupation fuels suicide terrorism, witnessing the contrast between overcrowded Palestinian neighborhoods and pristine Israeli settlements. Hamas leader Isma'il Abu Shanab tells her that suicide bombers need only "a moment of courage." A Palestinian Authority brigadier general profiles a typical recruit: a young, unemployed man who finds refuge in a mosque, where Hamas members notice his despair and recruit him with promises of paradise, family honor, and financial support. An Israeli counterterrorism expert tells Stern that Hamas's social welfare activities, including schools, clinics, and monthly stipends, are the most important element of its appeal.

In Indonesia, Stern investigates how government-engineered demographic shifts and economic crisis fueled religious violence. The Soeharto regime had encouraged Muslim migration into Maluku province, tipping the confessional balance and igniting ethno-religious conflict once Soeharto fell from power. She interviews Ja'far Umar Thalib, leader of Laskar Jihad, a Muslim militia formed after Christians massacred Muslims in Maluku. Stern argues that modernity itself creates fear through a surfeit of choice, making strict religious communities attractive because they proclaim an exclusive truth and impose external discipline.

In Jerusalem, Stern examines how Jewish extremists use ancient history and religious texts to justify violence over contested territory. She interviews Yoel Lerner, an MIT-trained mathematician imprisoned for plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine built atop the site of the ancient Jewish Temples. She meets Avigdor Eskin, a mystic who organized a cabalistic death curse outside Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's home in October 1995; 31 days later, Rabin was assassinated. She visits Yehuda Etzion, a former member of the Jewish Underground, an Israeli extremist group that had plotted to destroy the Dome of the Rock in the 1980s. Former Israeli security chief Carmi Gillon tells Stern that the radical Jewish right poses a grave threat to national security, perhaps even more than Hamas.

Part I concludes in Pakistan, where the dispute over Kashmir sustains a network of jihadi organizations. Stern visits the compound of Lashkar e Taiba (LET) outside Lahore, a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front, an umbrella alliance of jihadist groups. The group's leader, Hafez Sayeed, tells her that rulers of Muslim countries are puppets of the West. A young recruit named Ahmed asks Stern to portray mujahideen, or holy warriors, accurately. Ahmed was later killed fighting in Kashmir. Stern travels to Pakistan-held Kashmir under military escort, visiting refugee camps and the Line of Control, the military boundary dividing the territory between India and Pakistan. A retired Kashmiri militant named Firdous Syed tells her he quit after realizing that leaders were running "a conflict enterprise," enriching themselves while fighters risked their lives.

Part II shifts to how terrorist organizations function. Stern identifies a spectrum of types: virtual networks, lone-wolf avengers, commander-cadre organizations, and hybrid networks. She argues that the most important element is the mission, the story about "Us versus Them" that creates group identity, and presents a key trade-off between resilience (withstanding personnel losses) and capacity (executing large-scale attacks).

She examines the anti-abortion movement as a case study in "inspirational leadership." Michael Bray, the movement's leading intellectual who served four years for conspiring to bomb clinics, motivates followers through writing and sermons rather than material rewards, making him legally untouchable. This approach illustrates the doctrine of "leaderless resistance," developed by Aryan Nations activist Louis Beam, in which individuals operate without central direction. Stern also visits Paul Hill on death row at Florida State Prison, where Hill, entirely unrepentant for killing an abortion provider, claims to experience more joy and inner peace than ever before.

Stern profiles lone-wolf avengers who operate outside established groups. Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani immigrant, shot and killed two CIA employees outside CIA headquarters in 1993, telling Stern his action was "between jihad and tribal revenge." James Dalton Bell, an MIT-trained chemist, developed an Internet-based scheme to reward people who correctly predict the deaths of government officials. Stern warns that as powerful weapons become available to smaller groups, lone wolves will pose a growing threat.

Returning to Pakistan, Stern examines commander-cadre organizations. She meets Fazlur Rahman Khalil, leader of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and friend of bin Laden, and traces connections among key figures, including Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born operative later convicted in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Sheikh forged an alliance in Indian prison with gangster Aftab Ansari, linking organized crime to jihadi networks; Indian police intercepted evidence that Ansari transferred $100,000 through Sheikh to September 11 lead hijacker Mohammad Atta. Multiple militants tell Stern they initially joined for religious reasons but stayed for financial ones. She tours extremist madrassahs (religious schools) where children from desperately poor families receive free education, food, and lodging.

The final analytical chapter examines Al Qaeda as a hybrid organization. Stern opens with the story of Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a poor Zanzibari recruited through a mosque as a sleeper for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombing in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. At his trial in New York, the jury sentenced Mohamed to life without parole, concluding that execution would make him a martyr. Stern details Al Qaeda's organizational structure and weapons acquisition efforts, including attempts to obtain chemical, biological, and nuclear materials, and traces the evolution of bin Laden's mission through successive calls to jihad. She describes how Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Ayman Zawahiri shifted his group's focus from Egypt's secular government to the United States as a "marriage of convenience" with bin Laden. Post-September 11, Al Qaeda evolved from a hierarchical organization into a network of networks, relying on franchises, sleeper cells, and freelancers.

In her conclusion, Stern synthesizes her findings. People join religious terrorist groups partly to transform themselves: The humiliated become martyrs, the weak become strong, and uncertainty is banished. She identifies risk factors at multiple levels, from the global spread of powerful weapons to national failures of governance and economic stagnation. She warns against over-reliance on military responses and advocates covert action, development of alternative schools, nuclear security upgrades, and honest examination of how U.S. policies feed terrorist recruitment narratives. Religious terrorism, she concludes, aims to destroy moral distinctions themselves, and the response must combine tolerance, empathy, and courage with a commitment to democratic principles.