Jessica Stern

Why Religious Militants Kill.

A lecturer at Harvard University, Stern served as director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council and was the Superterrorism Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Included in Time magazine's series on 100 people with bold ideas, she is the model for the title character, played by Nicolle Kidman, in the movie, The Peacemaker.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 bravely ventured into the heart of Muslim fundamentalist organizations in Pakistan, Gaza, and Indonesia. 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 holeâ€ï¿½ in modern culture is to turn their anger on those whom they hold responsible for their feelings of emptiness and failure.

Stern warns that 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.