lewfri.JPGIt’s a holiday. The Padilla trial is not in session, but if the prosecution wanted to identify a better expert on terrorism than Pentagon-puppet Rohan Gunaratna who testified last week, they would spend the time off reading Jessica Stern’s astonishing 2003 book Terror in the Name of God – Why Religious Militants Kill.

Let me try to tell you about Jessica Stern. Jessica Stern is a rare intellectual, a Harvard professor who has gone to the most dangerous places in the world to meet with and try to comprehend terrorists.

A few years ago she sat down to supper in the home of Michael Bray, “the intellectual father of the extreme radical fringe of the anti-abortion movement, a movement that murders doctors who perform abortions and bombs abortion clinics. Stern has, as well, supped in Gaza City with Dr, Abdel Aziz Rantissi “one of the founders of Hamas and a member of the executive committee under house arrest at his home in Gaza.” Over a period of several years she did exactly what journalist Daniel Pearl did–only she survived.

Stern differs significantly from other terrorist profilers in her enormous capacity for empathy, believing that comprehending evil doers is better than demonizing them. As she breaks bread with a Hamas-trained suicide bomber, she comes to truly understand (as does the reader,) his twisted, distorted but now recognizable rationale for the murder of innocent women and children. Stern finds ways to communicate with terrorists, the foot soldiers as well as safe and secure leaders living in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, India, Pakistan, Texas and prisons in Florida and Virginia. She guides us to empathically understand how their religion blocks out fear and uncertainty, the depth of their alienation, how their humiliation destroys their very souls and drives them on the paths to martyrdom and murder.

Each time the United States responds to terrorists with massive violence, they create, Hydra-like, more recruits, more terrorists to take their place. “The terrorism we are fighting is a seductive idea, not a military target,” says Stern. But fight we must in a different way than invading countries, Stern advises, for she is a realist as well.

“Just as Al Qaeda and the International Islamic Front have emphasized penetrating, we need to penetrate them. Whenever and wherever possible, we should be sowing confusion and dissent among Al Quada and its franchise. We need to become as savvy at psychological warfare as they are. This too requires covert action, not armies. Ity requires emphasizing human intelligence and signals as much –or more–then satellite imagery, and hiring intelligence agents who speak the local language and are willing to face risks.”

The deciders in the Bush administration have chosen to ignore Stern’s advice with a strategy that promotes terrorist growth and strength. Our present course has resulted in children, on the streets and alleys of Gaza, daily engaging in “pretend” – they vie to see who will become s‘haheed, a martyr, a hero whose family will be rewarded by Hamas $5,000 in wheat, flour, sugar and other staples.

January 20, 2009 can’t come soon enough.

(with Rachel Koch)

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