Jessica Stern
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Jessica Stern |
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| Foremost U.S. expert on terrorism and Author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. Jessica Stern is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. She served as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council and was the Superterrorism Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill Stern spent five years interviewing members of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish extremist groups, probing the political, psychological, spiritual, and economic roots of the faith-based militancy that is spreading throughout the world as a reaction to globalization and the New World Order. She met with a vast array of extremist groups, including both the Jewish Underground and Hamas in Israel, the creator of the Taliban in Pakistan, and a former commander of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in a trailer park in Texas. Stern connects many of the factors that link religious terrorists - from members of al Qaeda to Timothy McVeigh. She finds that the majority who join these groups feel disenfranchised and left behind by modernity. Their response to the "God-shaped hole" in modern culture is to turn their anger on those whom they hold responsible for their feelings of emptiness and failure. In the battle against the New World Order, disparate groups with seemingly conflicting agendas may join forces against what they perceive as the common enemy: globalization and Western culture. Yet she also points out that military solutions will not bring down religious terrorism and, in many cases, it will only work as a rallying cry to strengthen the terrorists' cause. |