Jihadists Reading List

What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat - Louise Richardson, 2006
An overview of the motives of terrorists, with examples from worldwide terrorist groups illustrating the common elements. Also included are the implications for a more effective policy to contain terrorism.

Future Jihad: Terrorist strategies against the West - Walid Phares, 2005
An overview of the complex history and theology of jihadism, its main players and their motivations. The author is a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think tank in Washington, DC.

The True Believer - Eric Hoffer, 1951
Hoffer was among the first to recognize that the motivations of people joining mass movements were the lack of personal self-esteem and a passionate obsession to compensate for a lack of meaning in their own lives. Hoffer furthermore suggested that it is possible to head off an undesirable mass movement by substituting a benign mass movement which will give those prone to joining movements an outlet for their insecurities.

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A Battle for Global Values - Tony Blair, from Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007.
Summary: the war on terrorism is not just about security or military tactics. It is a battle of values, and one that can only be won by the triumph of tolerance and liberty. Afghanistan and Iraq have been the necessary starting points of this battle. Success there, however, must be coupled with a bolder, more consistent and more thorough application of global values, with Washington leading the way. Tony Blair is the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Knowing the Enemy - Mary Habeck. Essay published in Foreign Policy Research Institute E-Notes on November 17, 2006
Habeck does an outstanding job of condensing arcane and diverse Jihadists theology into a brief readable version. On the the faculty of Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Hitze School of Advanced International Studies, her most recent book is of this title.

NOW with Bill Moyers special Islam v. Islam 7/12/2002
A conversation with Bill Moyers and Muslim intellectuals debating the political vs. religious motivations of Jihadists, the degree of blame that the U.S. bears for support of authoritarian regimes, etc.

The following articles are available online via Parmly Billings Library. You'll need your library card number to log in.

Declaring victory: the United States is succeeding in its struggle against terrorism. The time has come to declare the war on terror over, so that an even more effective military and diplomatic campaign can begin. James Fallows.
The Atlantic Monthly 298.2 (Sept 2006): p60(11). From InfoTrac OneFile.
A more effective counter-terrorism attitude for the United States would be simply to declare "victory" in the "war on terrorism." We have made enormous progress in reducing the ease and likelihood of future attacks, but we will never eliminate them. Don't give in to fear -- and the consequent satisfactions of terrorists in watching our society go into major spasms of fear and upheaval in response to their efforts: don't let the terrorists see us as driven by fear. Don't help them make good on their boasts that they are utterly disrupting American and western society.

Knowing the Enemy. George Packer.
The New Yorker 82.42 (Dec 18, 2006): p60. From InfoTrac OneFile.
Based on an extensive interview with Lt. col. David Kilcullen of the Australian Army, on assignment as a counter-intelligence specialist first with the Pentagon and now with the U.S. State Department. Emphasizes that the war on terror is as much or more an informational, psychological and social development war as it is a military one -- and that "war" is the wrong language and concept for countering terrorism.

Azzam the American. Raffi Khatchadourian.
The New Yorker 82.46 (Jan 22, 2007): p50. From InfoTrac OneFile.
The biography describing the gradual radicalizing of a young American from a goat farm in southern California, following him from a local Islamic group to his present position as a senior al Qaeda operative/spokesman.

Just don't mention the war on terrorism; Essay.(Opinion). Joseph S. Nye Jr.
International Herald Tribune (Feb 9, 2007): p6.
Nye's comparison of the British government's ban on the term "war on terror" and the continued American usage of the term, pointing out that it is the language of war and battle that gives terrorists a cult-like sense of status and larger meaning to their efforts.