From Publishers Weekly
One of the West's leading scholars of terrorism, author of The New Terrorism and other titles, takes on the vexing questions about its origins and manifestations and provides a lot to chew on along the way. Laqueur, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., is at his strongest in relating the history of terrorism and how the motivations underlying such violence have changed. At the end of the 19th century, he writes, secular leftists in Russia aimed at overthrowing that regime and their targets were limited in number; the range of victims became much wider beginning in the 1970s. Laqueur also emphasizes a range of causes of terror, such as the incompetence of Arab governments and a desire to use Israel as a scapegoat for Arab problems. (Israel, he thinks, should give back the West Bank and Gaza Strip to help its own democracy, not because it would eliminate one excuse for Arab and Muslim fury.) Laqueur also ridicules some media outlets for refusing to call a spade a spade, referring to terrorists as militants or using other euphemisms. Unfortunately, his reasoning can sometimes be hard to follow. On the one hand, he argues that poverty and Western policies do not cause terrorism, but elsewhere he says that if the world were less economically inequitable, there would likely be less terrorism. In an appendix, the author states that while a definition of terrorism is impossible, the vast majority of us know it when we see it. Some may find it difficult to share his certainty.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Booklist
Laqueur is with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C. foreign-policy think-tank, and he was a well-published authority on "postmodern" terrorism long before September 11. In his first major work since then, the author discusses what is (and what isn't) new about international terrorism, and predicts a long road ahead in dealing with aggressive fanaticism. Taking particular issue with the notion that terrorism can be dealt with by alleviating global economic disparity, Laqueur argues that the "drain the swamp and the mosquitoes will disappear" strategy does not apply to wealthy internationally focused groups like al-Qaeda, whose ideological roots more closely resemble nineteenth-century anarchism than social-justice-minded class struggle. We would do better, he argues, to invoke psychopathology rather than economics in analyzing suicidal terrorism, and blame, in part, the increasingly radical rhetoric of mainstream Islam. Edward Said fans, take note: Laqueur's unabashedly conservative argument--ultimately based on the notion that being hated is a natural consequence of being great and powerful--is at heart a pointed critique of the postcolonialist sympathy for radicalism, made all the more compelling by the author's extensive background in terrorism studies. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
