Terrorist inspirations (political and religious) to conduct attacks

A few hours after the first American air strikes against Afghani-stan began on October 7, 200, a pre-recorded videotape was broadcast around the world. A tall, skinny man with a long, scraggly beard, wearing a camouflage fatigue jacket and the headdress of a desert tribes- man, with an AK-47 assault rifle at his side, stood before a rocky backdrop. In measured yet defiant language, Osama bin Laden again declared war on the United States. Like all his previous statements, bin Laden’s message that day was unmistakably religious in tone and content. “Praise be to God and we beseech him for help and forgiveness,” it began.

We seek refuge with the Lord of our bad and evildoing. He whom God guides is rightly guided but he whom God leaves to stray, for him wilt thou find no protector to lead him to the right way.

I witness that there is no God but God and Muhammad is his slave and prophet.

God Almighty hit the United States at its most vulnerable spot. He destroyed its greatest buildings. Praise be to God.

Here is the United States. It was filled with terror from its north to its south and from its east to its west. Praise be to God.

Chapter 4

Religion and Terrorism

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In thanking his god for the death and destruction that al Qaeda wrought on 9/, bin Laden clearly had cast his struggle in incontrovertibly theologi- cal terms. “As for the United States,” he concluded, “I tell it and its people these few words: I swear by Almighty God, who raised the heavens without pillars, that neither the United States nor he who lives in the United States will enjoy security before we can see it as a reality in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad, may God’s peace and bless- ing be upon him.”1 Of course, many historical and contemporary terrorist groups also evidence a strong religious component, mostly by dint of their membership. Anticolonial, nationalist movements such as the Jewish terror- ist organizations active in pre-independence Israel and the Muslim-domi- nated FLN in Algeria come readily to mind, as do more recent examples such as the overwhelmingly Catholic IRA; its Protestant counterparts, arrayed in various loyalist paramilitary groups like the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Red Hand Commandos; and the predomi- nantly Muslim PLO. However, in all these groups it is the political, not the religious aspect of their motivation that is dominant; the preeminence of their ethno-nationalist and/or irredentist aims is incontestable.

For others like al Qaeda, however, the religious motive is overriding; and indeed, the religious imperative for terrorism is the most important defining characteristic of terrorist activity today. The consequences of the revolution that transformed Iran into an Islamic republic in 979 have included its crucial role in the resurgence of this strand of terrorism; but, as I will show, the modern advent of religious terrorism has not been con- fined exclusively to Iran, much less to the Middle East or to Islam or to al Qaeda alone: since the 980s it has involved elements of all the world’s major religions and, in some instances, smaller sects or cults as well. “I have no regrets,” said Yigal Amir, the young Jewish extremist who in 995 assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, to the police. “I acted alone and on orders from God.”2 Today, Amir’s words could just as easily have come from the mouths of the Islamic Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists responsible for the wave of suicide bombings of civil- ian buses and public gathering places that have convulsed Israel; the young Dutch-Moroccan Muslim who brutally murdered controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004;3 the Japanese followers of Shoko Asa- hara in the Aum Shinrikyo sect who perpetrated the March 995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in hopes of hastening a new millennium; or the American Christian white supremacist Patriot movement, which, acting on an even more complex and less comprehensible mixture of sedi- tious, millenarian, paranoiac, and antigovernment beliefs has waged an

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inchoate campaign of bombing and assassination in the United States. As will become apparent, terrorism motivated either in whole or in part by a religious imperative, where violence is regarded by its practitioners as a divine duty or sacramental act, embraces markedly different means of legitimation and justification than that committed by secular terrorists, and these distinguishing features lead, in turn, to yet greater bloodshed and destruction.

The connection between religion and terrorism is not new. More than two thousand years ago the first acts of what we now describe as “terrorism” were perpetrated by religious fanatics. Indeed, some of the words we use in the English language to describe terrorists and their actions are derived from the names of Jewish, Hindi, and Muslim terrorist groups active long ago. The etymology of the word “zealot,”4 for example, which to us means an “immoderate partisan” or a “fanatical enthusiast,” can be traced back to a millenarian Jewish sect of the same name that fought in A.D. 66–73 against the Roman Empire’s occupation of what is now Israel. The Zealots waged a ruthless campaign of assassination, mostly of individuals, relying on the sica, a primitive dagger. The Zealot would emerge from the anonymous obscurity of a crowded marketplace, draw the sica that had been concealed beneath his robes, and in plain view of those present, dramatically slit the throat of a Roman legionnaire or a Jewish citizen who had been judged by the group guilty of betrayal, apostasy, or both. Thus, in an era long before CNN television news and the transmission of instantaneous live satellite images, the Zealots’ dramatic public acts of violence—precisely like those of terrorists today—were designed to have psychological repercussions far beyond the immediate victim(s) of the terrorist attack and thereby to send a powerful message to a wider, watching target audience—namely, the Roman occupation administration and Jews who collaborated with the invaders. The Zealots are also reputed to have employed a primitive form of chemi- cal warfare, poisoning wells and granaries used by the Romans and even sabotaging Jerusalem’s water supply.5

Similarly, the word “thug,” now used to describe “a vicious or brutal ruf- fian,”6 is derived from a seventh-century religious cult that terrorized India until its suppression in the mid-nineteenth century. The Thugs engaged in acts of ritual murder designed to serve the Hindu goddess of terror and destruction, Kali. On specified holy days throughout the year, group mem- bers would forsake their daily occupations and lie in wait for innocent travel- ers, who would be ritually strangled as sacrificial offerings to Kali. According to some accounts, the Thugs killed as many as a million people during their twelve-hundred-year existence, or more than eight hundred individuals

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every year, a murder rate rarely achieved by their modern-day counterparts armed with far more efficient and destructively lethal weaponry.7

Finally, the word “assassin”—“one who undertakes to put another to death by treacherous violence”8—was the name of a radical offshoot of the Muslim Shi’a Ismaili sect, which between A.D. 090 and 272 fought to repel the Christian crusaders attempting to conquer present-day Syria and Iran. Literally translated, “assassin” means “hashish eater,” a reference to the ritual intoxication that, as legend has it, the Assassins undertook before embarking on their missions of murder. Violence for the Assassins was a sacramental act, a divine duty, commanded by religious text and communi- cated by clerical authorities. Accordingly, the Assassins’ violence was meant not only to vanquish the sect’s Christian enemies but also to hasten the dawn of a new millennium as well. An important additional motivation for an Assassin was the promise that, should he himself perish in the course of carrying out his attack, he would ascend immediately to a glorious heaven. This same ethos of self-sacrifice and suicidal martyrdom can be seen in many Islamic—and indeed other religious—terrorist organizations today.

Until the nineteenth century, in fact, as Rapoport points out in his semi- nal study of what he terms “holy terror,” religion provided the only justifica- tion for terrorism.9 Many of the political developments of this era discussed in chapter —including the end of divine, monarchical rule in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, followed by the emergence of new concepts redefining the role of both citizen and state, alongside emergent notions of nationalism and self-determination—account for the shift in motivation and emphasis that then took place, and the growing popularity of various schools of radical political thought, embracing Marxist ideol- ogy (or its subsequent Leninist and Maoist interpretations), anarchism, and nihilism, completed the transformation of terrorism from a mostly religious to a predominantly secular phenomenon. This process of “secularization” was given fresh impetus by the anticolonialist/national liberation move- ments that arose after the Second World War to challenge continued West- ern rule in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa and subsequently exerted so profound an influence on ethno-nationalist/separatist and ideological ter- rorist organizations in the late 960s and early 970s.

While terrorism and religion share a long history, then, for the past cen- tury this particular manifestation has mostly tended to be overshadowed by ethno-nationalist/separatist and ideologically motivated terrorism. For example, none of the eleven identifiable international terrorist groups active in 968—the year, as previously noted, credited with marking the advent of modern, international terrorism—could be classified as religious: that

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is, having aims and motivations reflecting a predominant religious char- acter or influence.10 This, perhaps, is only to be expected at the height of the cold war, when the majority of terrorist groups (eight) were left-wing, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist ideological organizations, and the remain- ing three—including the various constituent groups of the PLO—reflected the emergence of the first postcolonial ethno-nationalist/separatist organi- zations. Not until 980—as a result of the repercussions of the revolution in Iran the previous year—did the first “modern” religious terrorist groups appear. Even so, despite the large increase in the total number of identifiable international terrorist groups from eleven to sixty-four and the concomitant tenfold increase (from three to thirty-two) of ethno-nationalist/separatist organizations (for reasons described in chapter 3), only two of the sixty- four groups active in 980 could be classified as predominantly religious in character and motivation: the Iranian-backed Shi’a organizations al-Dawa and the Committee for Safeguarding the Islamic Revolution.

However, while the reemergence of modern religious terrorism was ini- tially closely associated with the Islamic revolution in Iran, within a decade of that event none of the world’s major religions could claim to be immune to the same volatile mixture of faith, fanaticism, and violence. Twelve years later, in 992, the number of religious terrorist groups had increased exponentially (from two to eleven groups) and moreover had expanded to embrace major world religions other than Islam, as well as various obscure religious sects and cults.

Interestingly, as the number of religious terrorist groups was increasing, the number of ethno-nationalist/separatist terrorist groups declined appre- ciably. One explanation for this trend may be that many ethno-national- ist/separatist groups, suddenly finding themselves at the end of the cold war enmeshed in bitter conflict and civil wars over their homelands (for example, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Nagorno Karabakh, and other parts of East- ern Europe and the former Soviet Union), consequently had little time or energy to engage in international terrorism. Another plausible explanation is that at a time when the rigid bipolar structure of the cold war that had throttled the United Nations for nearly half a century was breaking down and new nations were obtaining sovereignty and rapidly gaining admission to the international community, there was perhaps less reason to resort to international terrorism in order to have one’s own irredentist claims recognized. Also, in circumstances where previous impediments to UN membership no longer existed, many groups may have come to regard the use of international terrorism not only as an embarrassment (that could potentially vitiate their case for joining the community of nations) but as

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counterproductive. Finally, it is also interesting to note that, notwithstand- ing the end of the cold war and the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the number of groups espousing Marxist-Leninist-Mao- ist dogma (or some idiosyncratic interpretation of those ideological ele- ments) remained unchanged, thus further challenging the cold war myth of a global terrorist conspiracy directed by, and dependent upon, Moscow and its communist minions.

Significantly, during the 990s the growth in the number of religious ter- rorist groups as a proportion of all active international terrorist organiza- tions not only continued but increased appreciably. In 994, for example, a third (sixteen) of the forty-nine identifiable international terrorist groups active that year could be classified as religious in character and/or motiva- tion; and in 995, their number grew yet again, to account for nearly half (twenty-six, or 46 percent) of the fifty-six known active international ter- rorist groups. A decade later, it is perhaps not surprising to find that this trend not only continued but solidified. In 2004, for instance, nearly half (fifty-two, or 46 percent) of the terrorist groups active that year were reli- gious, while thirty-two (28 percent) were left-wing groups, and twenty-four (2 percent) were ethno-nationalist/separatist organizations.

It is perhaps not surprising also that religion should become a far more popular motivation for terrorism in the post–cold war era as old ideologies lie discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union and communist ideology, while the promise of munificent benefits from the liberal-democratic, capi- talist state, apparently triumphant at what Francis Fukuyama in his famous aphorism has termed the “end of history,” fails to materialize in many coun- tries throughout the world. The “public sense of insecurity” engendered by these changes11—which has affected in equal measure the most economically disadvantaged (e.g., the Gaza Strip and the former Soviet Union) and the most prosperous (e.g., Japan and the United States)—has been deepened by other societal factors, including accelerated population growth, rapid urban- ization, and the breakdown of local services (e.g., medical care, housing, social welfare programs, and education), typically provided by the state.

The salience of religion as the major driving force behind international terrorism in the years preceding 9/ is further evidenced by the fact that the most serious terrorist acts of the decade—whether reckoned in terms of political implications and consequences or numbers of fatalities caused—all had a significant religious dimension and/or motivation. They include:

• the March 995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, perpetrated by an apocalyptic Japanese religious cult, which killed 2

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people and wounded 3,796 others,12 along with reports that the group also planned to carry out identical attacks in the United States;13

• the August 998 simultaneous suicide car and truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, by al Qaeda, in which 30 people were killed and more than 5,000 wounded;

• the bombing of a shopping mall in Zamboanga, Philippines, that same December by Muslim extremists belonging to the Abu Sayyaf Group, wounding 60 Christians who were Christmas shopping;

• the bombing in April 995 of an Oklahoma City federal office build- ing, where 68 people perished;

• the 993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center by Islamic radicals who deliberately attempted to topple one of the twin towers onto the other;

• the assassination in November 995, as previously mentioned, of Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish religious extremist, intended as only the first step in a campaign of mass murder designed to dis- rupt the peace process;

• the June 996 truck bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks in Dhah- ran, Saudi Arabia, where 9 people perished, by religious militants opposed to the reigning al-Saud regime;

• the string of bloody attacks by Hamas suicide bombers that turned the tide of Israel’s national elections, killing 60 people, between Feb- ruary and March 996;

• the brutal machine-gun and hand-grenade attack carried out by Egyptian Islamic militants on a group of Western tourists, killing 8, outside their Cairo hotel in April 996;

• the massacre in November 997 of 58 foreign tourists and 4 Egyptians by terrorists belonging to the Gamat al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) at the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt;

• the series of thirteen nearly simultaneous car and truck bombings that shook Bombay, India, in February 993, killing 400 people and injuring more than ,000 others, in reprisal for the destruction of an Islamic shrine in that country;

• the December 994 hijacking of an Air France passenger jet by Islamic terrorists belonging to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), who plotted—as in the 9/ attacks that would follow less than a decade later—to crash the aircraft and the 283 passengers on board into downtown Paris;14

• the wave of bombings unleashed by the GIA between the following July and October, in metro trains, outdoor markets, cafes, schools,

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and popular tourist spots, during which 8 people were killed and more than 80 others wounded;

• the unrelenting bloodletting by Islamic extremists in Algeria itself, which has claimed the lives of an estimated 00,000 people there since 992.

As this list suggests, terrorism motivated in whole or in part by religious imperatives has often led to more intense acts of violence that have produced considerably higher levels of fatalities than the relatively more discriminating and less lethal incidents of violence perpetrated by secular terrorist organi- zations. Although religious terrorists committed only 6 percent of recorded terrorist incidents between 998 and 2004, their acts were responsible for 30 percent of the total number of fatalities recorded during that time period.15 The direct relationship between the religious motive for terrorism and higher numbers of deaths is even more dramatically depicted by the record of vio- lence perpetrated by Shi’a Islamic terrorists during the 980s and by al Qaeda specifically since 998. Although Shi’a groups committed only 8 percent of all international terrorist incidents between 982 and 989, they nonetheless were responsible for 30 percent of the total number of fatalities arising from those incidents.16 And while al Qaeda perpetrated only 0. percent of all ter- rorist attacks between 998 and 2004, it was responsible for nearly 9 percent of total fatalities from terrorist attacks during that time period.17

Core Characteristics of Religious Terrorism

The reasons that terrorist incidents perpetrated for religious motives result in so many more deaths may be found in the radically different value sys- tems, mechanisms of legitimation and justification, concepts of morality, and worldviews embraced by the religious terrorist and his secular counterpart.

For the religious terrorist, violence is first and foremost a sacramental act or divine duty executed in direct response to some theological demand or imperative. Terrorism thus assumes a transcendental dimension, and its perpetrators therefore often disregard the political, moral, or practical con- straints that may affect other terrorists. Whereas secular terrorists, even if they have the capacity to do so, rarely attempt indiscriminate killing on a truly massive scale because such tactics are not consonant with their politi- cal aims and therefore are regarded as counterproductive, if not immoral, religious terrorists often seek the elimination of broadly defined catego- ries of enemies and accordingly regard such large-scale violence not only

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as morally justified but as necessary expedients for the attainment of their goals. Religion—conveyed by sacred text and imparted via clerical authori- ties claiming to speak for the divine—therefore critically serves as a means to explain contemporary events and, in turn, as a legitimating force justi- fying violence. This explains why clerical sanction is so important to reli- gious terrorists and why religious figures are often required to “bless” (i.e., approve or sanction) terrorist operations before they are executed.

Finally, religious and secular terrorists also have starkly different percep- tions of themselves and their violent acts. Whereas secular terrorists regard violence either as a way of instigating the correction of a flaw in a system that is basically good or as a means to foment the creation of a new system, religious terrorists see themselves not as components of a system worth preserving but as “outsiders” seeking fundamental changes in the existing order. This sense of alienation also enables the religious terrorist to con- template far more destructive and deadly types of terrorist operations than secular terrorists, indeed to embrace a far more open-ended category of “enemies” for attack—that is, anyone who is not a member of the terror- ists’ religion or religious sect. This explains the rhetoric common to “holy terror” manifestos describing those outside of the terrorists’ religious com- munity in denigrating and dehumanizing terms as, for example, “infidels,” “dogs,” “children of Satan,” and “mud people.” The deliberate use of such terminology to condone and justify terrorism is significant, for it further erodes constraints on violence and bloodshed by portraying the terrorists’ victims as either subhuman or unworthy of living.

Islamic Groups

These core characteristics, while common to religious terrorists of all faiths, have nonetheless often been most closely associated with Islamic terrorist groups in general and Iranian-inspired ones and al Qaeda and its associates in particular.

The revolution that transformed Iran into an Islamic republic in 979 played a crucial role in the modern advent of religious terrorism. At the root of the Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist campaign was the aim of extending the fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law espoused in Iran to other Muslim countries. “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world,” the Ayatollah Khomeini declared on the occasion of the Ira- nian new year in March 980, just over a year after the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran,

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and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the cham- pion of all oppressed people. . . . We must make plain our stance toward the powers and superpowers and demonstrate to them despite the ardu- ous problems that burden us. Our attitude to the world is dictated by our beliefs.18

The Iranian revolution in Iran has been held up as an example to Mus- lims throughout the world, exhorting them to reassert the fundamental teachings of the Qur’an and to resist the intrusion of Western—particu- larly United States—influence into the Middle East. This stance reflects the beliefs and history of Shi’a Islam as interpreted by Khomeini and subscribed to by his followers in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. It begins with the notion of the Shi’a as a centuries-old minority within Islam, per- secuted because of its special, revealed knowledge, but it further entails an unswerving conviction of the inherent illegitimacy of all secular gov- ernment. Under this rationale, legitimacy can be conferred only through the adoption of Islamic law in order to facilitate the return of the Prophet Mohammed to earth as the Messiah. Accordingly, since Iran is the only state to have begun the process of redemption by creating a “true” Islamic state, it must be the advocate for the oppressed and aggrieved everywhere. Not only are violence and coercion permissible in order to achieve the worldwide spread of Islamic law, but they are also a necessary means to this divinely sanctioned end.

The sense of alienation and of the necessity for far-reaching changes in the world order is apparent in the works of a number of Shi’a theologians. “The world as it is today is how others shaped it,” wrote Ayatollah Baqer al-Sadr. “We have two choices: either to accept it with submission, which means letting Islam die, or to destroy it, so that we can construct the world as Islam requires.” Mustafa Chamran has stated: “We are not fighting within the rules of the world as it exists today. We reject all those rules.” Hussein Mussawi, the former leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah who was the victim of an Israeli helicopter-borne assassination in 992, once remarked, “We are not fighting so that the enemy recognizes us and offers us something. We are fighting to wipe out the enemy.”19

These statements also reflect the Shi’a perception of encirclement and concomitant predatory defensiveness. “We, the sons of the community of Hezbollah [the Party of God],”20 a 985 communiqué from the Lebanese Shi’a terrorist group of the same name declared, “consider ourselves a part of the world Islamic community, attacked at once by the tyrants and the

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arrogant of the East and the West. . . . Our way is one of radical combat against depravity, and America is the original root of depravity.”21 That Hez- bollah perceives itself as fighting an entirely self-defensive struggle, sanc- tioned if not commanded by God, is also evident in the pronouncements of the group’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. “We do not hold in our Islamic belief that violence is the solution to all types of problems,” he once told an interviewer. “Rather, we always see violence as a kind of surgical operation that a person should use only after trying all other means, and only when he finds his life imperiled. . . . The violence began as the people, feeling themselves bound by impotence, stirred to shatter some of that enveloping powerlessness for the sake of liberty.” In this context, Fadlallah pointed out, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 982 was the embodi- ment of the West’s hostility to revolutionary Islam:

This invasion was confronted by the Islamic factor, which had its roots in the Islamic Revolution in Iran. And throughout these affairs, America was the common denominator. America was generally perceived as the great nemesis behind the problems of the region, due to its support for Israel and many local reactionary regimes, and because it distanced itself from all causes of liberty and freedom in the area.22

Fadlallah unhesitatingly justifies Islamic terrorism on the grounds of self- defense. “We are not preachers of violence,” he declared in a 996 interview. “Jihad [literally “striving,” but in this context “holy war”] in Islam is a defen- sive movement against those who impose violence.”23 For Hezbollah, then, the struggle against Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon was nothing less than divinely ordained. “The Resistance is not led by commanders,” one local cleric proclaimed. “It is directed by the tenets of Islam.”24

The role of clerical authority in sanctioning terrorist operations has always been critical to both Shi’a and Sunni organizations. The fatwa (a legal ruling or statement of legal issues, given by a mufti—a qualified jurist—at the request of a religious court)25 issued in 989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini imposing the death sentence on the author Salman Rushdie is precisely a case in point. Similarly, the Sunni extremists who bombed New York City’s World Trade Center in 993 specifically obtained a fatwa from Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman (the blind Egyptian cleric who is now imprisoned in the United States) before planning their attack. Muslim clerics have also lent their support and encouraged as well as given their blessing even to self-martyrdom—though suicide is forbidden by Islamic law. For example, immediately after the 983 suicide attacks on the U.S. Marines and French

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paratroop headquarters, Hussein Mussawi said: “I proclaim loud and clear that the double attack of Sunday is a valid act. And I salute, at Death’s door, the heroism of the kamikazes, which they are; they are now under the pro- tection of the All Powerful one and of the angels.”26

Nor are such sentiments restricted to radical Shi’a only. Militant Sunni fundamentalist organizations portray their struggle in similarly uncompro- mising terms. According to Antar Zouabri, a leader of the GIA’s struggle in the 990s to establish an Islamic republic in Algeria, there can never be either dialogue or truce in his organization’s struggle against the illegiti- mate, secular Algerian government. The word of God, he argued, is immu- table on this point: God, Zouabri explained to an interviewer in 996, does not negotiate or engage in discussion. Zouabri further couched the GIA’s campaign in terms of an “all-out war.” Its ineluctable mission, he said, is to “found a true Islamic state”: should innocents perish in the course of achieving this divinely commanded aim, then so be it. In the first instance, Zouabri explained, the killing of “apostates,” or those not a part of the Islamic movement, is a duty for him and his followers. In any event, the Prophet excuses the murder of innocents, as revealed in a verse from the Qur’an that Zouabri quoted: “I am innocent of those killed because they were associated with those who had to be fought.”27

The struggle being waged against Israel by the Islamic Resistance Move- ment (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya), better known by its Arabic acro- nym, Hamas (which also means “zeal”),28 is similarly cast in terms of an all- out war from which there can be no respite until the enemy is vanquished. The Hamas Covenant, for example, bluntly states: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,”29 a view reflected in the words of a leader of the group’s political wing, who told American scholar Mark Juergensmeyer that “Palestine is not completely free”—not in reference to the truncated sovereignty exercised over seven Palestinian urban centers by Mahmoud Abbas’s (Abu Mazen) Palestine Authority (PA),30 but “until it is an Islamic state.”31 Moreover, the Hamas Covenant’s article 7 displays clear millenarian overtones, declaring: “The time [of Redemption] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees when the call is raised: ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew hiding! Come and kill him.’ ”32 The religious terrorist’s preoccupation with the elimination of an almost open- ended category of enemies is further illustrated in the sermon preached at a Gaza City mosque in 987 by Hamas’s founder and spiritual leader, Imam Sheikh Ahmad Ibrahim Yassin (who was killed in 2004 by an Israeli air strike). Driving home the point that Hamas’s war is not only against Israel,

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but against all Jews, Yassin reportedly declared, “Six million descendants of monkeys [i.e., Jews] now rule in all the nations of the world, but their day, too, will come. Allah! Kill them all, do not leave even one.”33

Bin Laden has deliberately framed al Qaeda’s struggle in similarly stark, uncompromisingly theological terms. At a time when the impersonal forces of economic determinism and globalization were thought to have sub- merged the ability of a single man to affect the course of history, bin Laden has effectively melded the strands of religious fervor, Muslim piety, and a profound sense of grievance into a powerful ideological force. “All men dream: but not equally,” T. E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Ara- bia, once wrote. “Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”34 Bin Laden is indeed one of the dangerous men that Law- rence described. He has repeatedly defined al Qaeda’s fundamental raison d’être in terms of the “clash of civilizations” religious typology that America and its allies in the war on terrorism have labored so hard to avoid. “These events,” bin Laden declared in his October 7, 200, statement, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, “have divided the world into two sides—the side of believers and the side of infidels. . . . Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious. The winds of faith have come.”35 In a videotaped speech broadcast over al-Jazeera television on November 3, 200, he reiter- ated this message, stating: “This is a matter of religion and creed, it is not what Bush and Blair maintain, that it is a war against terrorism. There is no way to forget the hostility between us and the infidels. It is ideological, so Muslims have to ally themselves with Muslims.”36

During the late 990s bin Laden set the stage for this clash as the author/ architect of two major fatwas.37 The first, issued on August 23, 996, was a lengthy and turgid diatribe. Titled “Declaration of War Against the Ameri- cans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places: A Message from Usama bin Muhammad bin Laden Unto his Muslim Brethren All Over the World Generally, and in the Arab Peninsula Specifically,” it presented bin Laden’s seminal analysis of Islam under siege. In this respect, it also evidenced the perennial terrorist characteristic, described in chapter , of the reluctant warrior, thrown perpetually on the defensive with no option but to embrace violence in response to the transgressions of some aggressive, predatory enemy. “Praise be to Allah,” bin Laden began.

We seek His help and ask for his pardon. We take refuge in Allah from our wrongs and bad deeds. . . . I bear witness that there is no God except

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Allah, no associates with Him and I bear witness that Muhammad is His slave and messenger. . . .

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suf- fered from aggression, inequity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Cashmere [Kashmir], Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin [sic], Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya and in Bosnia and Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn’t respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves. . . .

The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets. . . .

Without shedding blood no degradation and branding can be removed from the forehead I remind the youths of the Islamic world, who fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia Herzegovina with their wealth, pens, tongues and themselves that the battle had not finished yet [sic].38

Although widely dismissed and ignored at the time as inflated rhetoric or posturing braggadocio, the 996 fatwa was an unambiguous clarion call to battle for Muslims everywhere. “My Muslim Brothers of The World,” bin Laden concluded,

Your brothers in Palestine and in the land of the two Holy Places are calling upon your help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy your enemy and their enemy the Americans and the Israelis. [T]hey are asking you to do whatever you can, with one[’s] own means and ability, to expel the enemy, humiliated and defeated, out of the sanc- tities of Islam. Exalted be to Allah [sic].39

The second fatwa, styled as a “Statement of the World Islamic Front: Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” was issued on February 23, 998. Although the basic message was the same, it differed from the 996 iteration in that bin Laden was now only one of five signatories. The others were Ayman al-Zawa- hiri, emir of the Jihad Group in Egypt; Abu Yasir Rifa’I Ahmad Taha, head

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of the Egyptian Islamic Group; Sheikh Mir Hamza, secretary of the Jamiat- ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlur Rahman, emir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. After obeisantly paying homage to “God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism . . . and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-’Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my live- lihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders ,”40 the fatwa explained how the

crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema [“the legal schol- ars of Islam, ‘guardians of the faith’ ”41] have throughout Islamic history agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Mus- lim countries. . . .

On that basis, and in compliance with God’s order, we issue the fol- lowing fatwa to all Muslims:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.”42

It was duly executed six months later with the simultaneous suicide attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A statement released that same day by the “International Islamic Front,” reiterated and justified the previous calls for jihad.

Oh Muslims, the Israeli cancer in Palestine and the American cancer in the land Hijaz (i.e., Saudi Arabia) must be uprooted. Islam obliges us to liberate all Muslim land from occupiers whoever they may be whether American, Israeli or other forces. . . .

Oh Muslims, yours is an Ummah [worldwide community of Muslims] for whom jihad is the spearhead of its ideology whose creed is built upon a firm foundation with unshakeable belief that victory is from Allah and that Allah has promised authority, victory and domination which will undoubtedly be fulfilled God willing.43

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The February 998 fatwa also exemplified one of bin Laden’s major theo- logical accomplishments: interpreting the imperative of jihad as an indi- vidual responsibility incumbent upon Muslims everywhere.44 This hence- forth became a familiar theme of bin Laden’s declarations, articulated with increasing fervor in a succession of uncompromising exhortations. In his “Message to the Youth of the Muslim Ummah” of December 9, 200, for instance, bin Laden detailed how jihad

has become fard-ain [obligatory] upon each and every Muslim. . . . The time has come when all the Muslims of the world, especially the youth, should unite and soar against the kufr [nonbeliever] and continue jihad till these forces are crushed to naught, all the anti-Islamic forces are wiped off the face of this earth and Islam takes over the whole world and all other false religions.45

The above statement, in fact, encapsulates precisely bin Laden’s preeminent objective: the restoration of a pan-Islamic caliphate that is at once as idealized as it is venerated.46 The caliphate, which disappeared with the demise of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 924, is recalled by Muslims as a “golden age of Islam,”47 when the theocratic “structure of law and governance bequeathed by the Mohammed to his successors” reigned and divinely revealed Sacred Law took precedence over secular “arbitrary or natural law.”48 Ayman al- Zawahiri, cosigner of the February 998 fatwa and a physician by training who was the founder and leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad49 and is seen as both al Qaeda’s chief strategist and bin Laden’s deputy,50 also invoked this long-lamented desideratum in a fatwa he personally issued that same year. Al Qaeda’s goal, al-Zawahiri wrote, was as immutable as it was straightfor- ward: to “unite all Muslims and establish a government that follows the rule of the Caliphs.”51 Three years later, as he fled with bin Laden from Afghani- stan, pursued by the Afghani Northern Alliance and the combined might of the American and coalition militaries, al-Zawahiri stubbornly clung to his belief that that day would still come. While the “establishment of a Muslim state in the heart of the Islamic world,” he conceded, “is not an easy goal or an objective that is close at hand . . . it constitutes the hope of the Muslim nation to reinstate its fallen caliphate and regain its lost glory.”52

The United States is seen by both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri as willfully impeding this goal. They describe the United States as the “far enemy” that must be defeated both because of America’s alleged opposition to Islam and the active support that its gives to the so-called near enemy—the corrupt, reprobate, and authoritarian anti-Islamic regimes in the Middle East, Cen-

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tral Asia, South Asia, and South-East Asia that could not otherwise remain in power.53 In a May 998 interview with ABC News, bin Laden explained his profound enmity toward the United States: “We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. . . . We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civil- ians: they are all targets.”54 On al-Jazeera television the following year, bin Laden used similar words to make the same point: “Our enemy . . . is every American male, whether he is directly fighting us or paying taxes.”55 Indeed, during the years immediately preceding the 9/ attacks, bin Laden often lauded the men who bombed the New York City World Trade Center in 993 as “role models” and repeatedly beseeched Muslims to “take the fight- ing to America.”56

Jewish Terrorism

Significantly, the same characteristics attributed to Islamic terrorist groups—the legitimation of violence by reference to religious precepts, the sense of alienation, the existence of a terrorist movement in which the activists are the constituents, and a preoccupation with the elimination of a broadly defined category of “enemies”—are equally apparent among the Jew- ish terrorist movements that have surfaced in Israel since the early 980s. To a great extent, many of the members of these groups draw their inspiration from the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.57 A native of New York, Kahane preached a liturgy of virulent hatred of Arabs that simultaneously extolled the virtues of Jewish aggressiveness and combativeness. He was a prolific author,58 ser- monizer, public speaker, and newspaper columnist59 who founded his own (now outlawed) Israeli political party/vigilante organization, Kach (Thus), to disseminate his extreme, uncompromising views.60 Kahane’s overriding obsession was to reverse the mythical image of the Jews as victim. From this flowed his conviction that the Jews were enmeshed in a continual struggle against an inherently anti-Semitic world, surrounded by hatemongers and closet anti-Semites in the United States and predatory, bloodthirsty Arabs both inside and encircling Israel. “And, above all,” he wrote in 97 and reit- erated throughout his life, “let us understand that people, in the very best of times, do not like Jews.”61 Kahane’s prescription in the face of this eternally bleak Jewish condition was simple: a militant aggressiveness, portrayed as nothing more than the inalienable right of self-defense, that evoked images of Frantz Fanon’s philosophy of the catharsis of violence.62 “Never again,” Kahane declared, “means that we have had it in the concept of being beaten

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and not hitting back. No one will respect us, and no one in the end will love us, if we don’t respect ourselves.”63

When Kahane and his family emigrated to Israel in 97, he began to apply his program of strident self-assertion to the “Palestinian problem.” This entailed repeated and vitriolic denunciations of governmental policies with respect both to the peace and to its alleged “soft” approach to countering Palestinian terrorism. In 980, for example, Kahane openly called upon the Israeli government to establish an official “Jewish terrorist group” whose sole purpose would be to “kill Arabs and drive them out of Israel and the Occu- pied Territories.”64 For more than a decade afterward, he unceasingly called for the forced expulsion of all Arabs from Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel— that is, the biblical lands of Greater Israel, embracing both the current state’s territory and the occupied West Bank) or for their physical annihilation if they refused to leave. In a speech before university students in a Los Angeles suburb in 988, Kahane described the Arabs as “dogs,” as people who “mul- tiply like fleas” who must be expelled from Israel or eliminated.65 In this manner Kahane sought to dehumanize Arabs completely and thus make his odious policy prescriptions more tolerable and acceptable to Jews. “I don’t intend to sit quietly by while Arabs intend to liquidate my state—either by bullets or by having babies,” he declared. “It’s important that you know what the name ‘Kahane’ means to the Arabs. It means terror.”66

Kahane’s concerns, however, went far beyond practical matters of secu- rity to embrace mystical Judaic notions that condoned and justified ill treat- ment of—even violence against—the Arabs. In this respect, the responsibil- ity of all Jews to work actively to hasten redemption became immutably aligned with the “sin” of returning to the Arabs the biblical lands (the West Bank) that God gave to Israel. “Is there no longer a G-d in Israel?” Kahane asked in 98

Have we so lost our bearings that we do not understand the ordained historical role of the State of Israel, a role that ensures that it can never be destroyed and that no further exile from it is possible? Why is it that we do not comprehend that it is precisely our refusal to deal with the Arabs according to halakhic [Jewish religious law] obligation that will bring down on our heads terrible sufferings, whereas our courage in removing them will be one of the major factors in the hurrying of the final redemption?67

When a Jewish yeshiva (Jewish religious school) student was murdered by Arabs two years later, a group of Kahane’s followers in the ultranation-

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alist West Bank settler movement Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) decided to take action. Their plan was to attack an Islamic college in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank at a time of day calculated to inflict the maximum casualties. Significantly, like their Islamic counterparts, the Jew- ish settlers sought the specific approval and sanction of their own clerical authorities for the operation. Indeed, among the group it was axiomatic that they would not—indeed, that they could not—act without rabbinical blessing. Having secured this dispensation, the terrorists struck: opening fire with machine guns on the Islamic students as they emerged from their classrooms for the noontime recess, they killed three and wounded another thirty-three.

Emboldened by the success of this operation—and armed once again with rabbinical sanction—the terrorists set in motion plans for an even more ambitious attack. They now plotted the simultaneous bombings of five Arab buses at a day and time when they were guaranteed to be packed with pas- sengers but the roads were likely to be empty of Jews. The plan was to attach explosive devices to the gas tanks of the buses, setting them to detonate on a Friday evening, after the Jewish Sabbath had begun. However, just as the group was about to act, they were all arrested. Only then did information come to light that for the preceding four years the group had also been plot- ting to blow up Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock—the third holiest shrine of Islam—which occupies the same grounds as the most sacred site in the Jew- ish religion, the Second Temple, which was destroyed in A.D. 70.68

The so-called Temple Mount operation represented a dramatic escala- tion in the terrorists’ campaign, propelling it on a violent trajectory from simple vengeance wrought against mere mortals to genuine millenarian dimensions. The twenty-eight precision bombs that the terrorist cell had constructed were to them not mere instruments of death and destruction but the means by which miracles were to be attained.69 Their goal was not just to destroy a Muslim holy place for reasons of blind hatred or petu- lant revenge but to facilitate the resurrection of a Jewish Third Temple and thereby enable the Messiah’s return. They were convinced that through their actions they could themselves hasten redemption. Even more alarm- ing, though, was the terrorists’ ancillary motive. By obliterating so vener- ated an Islamic shrine, they also sought to spark a cataclysmic war between Israel and the Muslim world. The terrorists’ vision was that a beleaguered Jewish state, attacked on all sides by enraged, unrelenting, savage forces, would have no option but to unleash its nuclear arsenal. The result would be the complete annihilation of Israel’s Arab enemies,70 and the establishment on earth of a new “Kingdom of Israel”—a theocracy governed by a divinely

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anointed Jewish king and held in judgment by a true “Supreme Court.”71 As with the terrorists’ previous operations, this grand scheme was again entirely dependent on obtaining clerical approval.

The same volatile combination—messianic visions of redemption, legiti- mated by clerical dispensation and achieved through direct action entailing indiscriminate mass murder—was also evident a decade later in the 994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre and the assassination of Rabin the follow- ing year.72 The first incident occurred on February 25, 994, at a holy site revered (and shared) by both Judaism and Islam. Dr. Baruch Goldstein, an American-born, ultranationalist, orthodox Jew and ardent disciple of Kahane, entered the Ibrahim (Abraham) Mosque, located at the Cave, and opened fire on Muslim worshipers who had gathered there for Friday (Sab- bath) services. His attack was timed to coincide not only with the middle of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan (when the mosque was certain to be filled to capacity) but also with the Jewish festival of Purim. Purim celebrates how a Jew named Mordecai, living in fifth-century B.C. Persia, single-handedly saved his people from their archenemy, Haman. Seeking to play the role of a modern-day savior, Goldstein fired 9 bullets from his American-man- ufactured M-6 assault rifle into the crowd, killing 29 and wounding 50 before he was set upon by the stunned congregants, who beat him to death. Goldstein’s grave is now a shrine, guarded and revered by the ultrareligious nationalists who share his intense animus toward secular Israeli govern- ment and regard the peace accords as a blasphemous plan to hand over to the Palestinians the biblical lands that God gave to the Jewish people. Like the Temple Mount plotters, Goldstein had sought to place himself in the vanguard of the actualization of the Jews’ destiny. His mission, like theirs, was no less than to hasten redemption through the cataclysmic forces that his violent act was meant to unleash. This, Goldstein was certain, would ensure not only Israel’s perennial possession of its biblical birthright but the coming of the Messiah as foretold by Kahane.

The assassination in 995 of Prime Minister Rabin exuded the same uncompromising blend of religious fervor coupled with intense enmity toward Israel’s secular government, its elected leaders, and the peace pro- cess that would return God-given lands to the Jews’ most implacable oppo- nents. Like Goldstein, Amir believed that he was fulfilling God’s will. Invok- ing the halakhic decree of the “law of the pursuer” (Din Rodef), he explained to his police interrogators that he was completely justified in murdering the person he considered the architect of the Jewish people’s doom. “The minute a Jew betrays his people and country to the enemy,” Amir main- tained, “he must be killed.”73 Amir appears to have been greatly influenced

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by extremist rabbis who had repeatedly condemned Rabin to death as a mortal enemy of the Jewish people.74 Amir, accordingly, felt a moral obli- gation—what he himself described as a “mystical” urge—to kill a person declared by his religious authorities to pose so grave a danger to the Jewish people. “Perhaps physically I acted alone,” Amir proclaimed during his trial, “but it was not only my finger on the trigger but the entire nation which for two thousand years dreamed about this country and spilled its blood for it.”75 Indeed, information that came to light after the assassination revealed that Amir had tried to murder Rabin on at least two previous occasions. The assassination, moreover, was intended by Amir and his alleged confederates to be only the first step in a campaign of mass murder, including car bomb- ings to avenge Palestinian suicide attacks as well as the murder of Palestin- ian terrorists released from Israeli jails as part of the peace process.

Any hope that these uncompromisingly violent sentiments—backed and indeed encouraged by clerical decree—might have dissipated in the furor and national soul-searching that followed Rabin’s assassination was dispelled by the call from an extremist rabbi in April 997 for Jews to emu- late Hamas and launch suicide attacks of their own against Arabs. “Suicide during wartime is permissible for the sake of the victory of Israel,” wrote the rabbi from the West Bank settlement of Tapuah, advocating Jewish self- martyrdom in an article titled “Sacrificing Oneself for God.” “A man who volunteers for such operations,” he proclaimed, “will be called a hero and a martyr.”76

American Christian White Supremacists

Half a world away from the Middle East in the heartland of America, the use of violence is similarly justified by theological imperative as a means to overthrow a reviled secular government and attain both racial purification and religious redemption. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City in April 995 suddenly shed unaccus- tomed light on an indigenous, violent, Christian white supremacist move- ment that had been active long before this tragedy.

In June 997 Timothy McVeigh, a twenty-eight-year-old U.S. Army vet- eran, was convicted in a Denver federal court of perpetrating the attack. Sen- tenced to death by lethal injection, McVeigh was executed four years later. An antigovernment, right-wing extremist, McVeigh engineered the attack with the help of a friend, Terry L. Nichols, to commemorate the second anni- versary of the FBI’s bloody assault on the Branch Davidians’ compound in

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Waco, Texas, in the course of which seventy-four people, including twenty- one children, were killed.77 He and his alleged accomplice(s) were apparently obsessed by the idea that the Waco assault—and a similar FBI siege of an alleged white supremacists’ rural cabin at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, the previous year78—represented the opening salvo in U.S. government plans to outlaw and seize all privately held firearms. There were other motivations as well— including vengeance, protest, and armed resistance79—which, it transpired, are shared by the members of the well-armed, militantly antigovernment “citizens’ militias” with whom McVeigh mixed. Zealous exponents, like those linked to the Oklahoma City bombing, of the American Constitution’s Sec- ond Amendment, which provides for a well-regulated civilian militia and upholds the right to bear arms, many of these groups also evince the same combination of seditious, anti-Semitic, and racist views that is common to the broader American Christian Patriot (white supremacist) movement. In this respect, the militias have been described as part of a longer “conveyor belt,” in a phrase coined by Leonard Zeskind (the director of the Atlanta- based Center for Democratic Renewal, an organization that monitors militia activity). The metaphor is intended to depict a process whereby individu- als are initially recruited into groups like the militias on the basis of their opposition to legislation outlawing firearms but gradually come to embrace increasingly extreme and violent positions that, in turn, are legitimated by appeals to scripture and theological imperatives.

Although organized hate groups and other bodies similarly preoccu- pied with far-fetched conspiracy theories have existed in the United States for decades, the advent of extremist white supremacist “citizens’ militias” and related Christian Patriot paramilitary groups oriented toward “sur- vivalism,” outdoor skills, guerrilla training, and outright sedition is a more recent development. Thus, while the various militia movements have sur- faced only within the past fifteen years or so, they are in fact but the latest manifestations of a radical right-wing and white supremacist movement that has repeatedly “repackaged” itself in a bid to attract new recruits and a larger number of adherents and supporters. With the militias, the wider antigovernment movement discovered a powerful way of attracting peo- ple—like McVeigh—who were not only vehemently opposed to gun con- trol but also subscribed to a variety of fantastic conspiracy theories that invariably involved the Clinton administration in some master plan to seize all firearms held by American citizens and thereby proscribe funda- mental individual liberties. According to Michael Fortier, a close friend of McVeigh’s, who testified for the prosecution at McVeigh’s trial, “We both believed that the United Nations was actively trying to form a one-world

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government, disarm the American public, take away our weapons.”80 The Michigan Militia, an allegedly twelve-thousand-strong paramilitary sur- vivalist organization to which McVeigh and Nichols are believed to have been linked,81 believes that the U.S. government has already initiated a pro- gram to control completely the life of every American. “The Government is [already] in control,” explains Ray Southwell, the group’s cofounder and information officer. “And if you push back, if you cross the Government, they will come down on you hard. We are preparing to defend our freedom. The way things are going, I think bullets might be as valuable as gold and silver one day soon.”82 Accordingly, through training in guerrilla warfare and survivalist techniques, the militia prepares to resist what it maintains were plans by the Clinton administration to deploy UN forces armed with cast-off Soviet military equipment or hordes of communist Chinese troops, backed by Latino and black inner-city American street gangs, to crush any opposition. Stripped bare of its conspiratorial explanations, the Michigan Militia’s purpose is sedition, plain and simple: its other cofounder and com- mander, Norman E. Olson, made no bones about that. “My goal is not to plan a revolution,” he boasted in a 994 message posted over the Internet (the favored means of communication of militia members and other white supremacists), “for revolution will come. . . . My goal is to establish the Republican Provisional Government.”83

At one time, an estimated eight hundred other similarly oriented mili- tias—with a total membership claimed to be more than five million, though more realistically put at no more than one hundred thousand—had report- edly organized in almost every state of the Union.84 The difficulty in gaug- ing even the rough dimensions of the American militia movement at what would have been its height in the mid-990s is a product not only of its geo- graphical pervasiveness and its then-unimpeded growth but also of critical differences between the two different types of militias that had emerged. On the one hand, there are the so-called talking militias (also known as “out-front” militias), to which the vast majority of the movement’s adher- ents belong. The members of these groups are primarily concerned with opposing antigun legislation rather than with fomenting revolution, and consequently they are neither especially nor explicitly violent. Their poli- tics therefore tend to reflect the entirely secular conspiracy theories that have long been associated with various far-right American groups parodied in films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The “marching” militias (also referred to as “up-front” militias), on the other hand, were actively involved in violent, seditious activities, embracing the combination of revo- lutionary, racist, and anti-Semitic doctrines inherent in the wider Ameri-

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can Christian Patriot movement today. It is this more radical element of the militia phenomenon—whose members perhaps number no more than a dedicated hard core of ten thousand people—who fervently believe in the impending UN invasion and takeover of America and therefore resolved to take violent action to prevent it from occurring.85

Among the more prominent of the “marching” militia groups that have come to light since the Oklahoma bombing is the Militia of Montana, or MOM. This organization embraces the same ineluctable revolution- ary principles and harbors the same profound fears as its counterparts in Michigan and elsewhere. “Gun control is people control,”86 its founders, brothers John and David Trochmann, declared in a 995 interview. MOM’s more than twelve thousand claimed members accordingly train in guer- rilla warfare, survivalist techniques, and other unconventional tactics in preparation for withstanding the inevitable federal government onslaught to seize their weapons and deprive them of their inalienable right to bear arms, presaged by the Branch Davidian raid. The group also markets its own range of do-it-yourself manuals and tapes that not only explain how to manufacture bombs but exhort listeners to prepare for the coming apoca- lypse that is sure to engulf the United States in retribution for its “sins against God.”87 A more recent posting on its Web site explains in ambigu- ous language that

We, at the Militia of Montana, are dedicated to ensuring that all Ameri- cans are educated to make an informed decision as to which direction America should go. Along with being physically prepared to withstand the onslaught which will erupt no matter where we end up, we must at all costs, keep reaching those who have not had the opportunity to decide for themselves. The Militia of Montana has been, and continues to be, a national focal point for assisting [sic] Americans in forming their own grass roots organization dedicated to American’s [sic] sovereignty and status as an independent nation among the nations of the world.88

Montana is also home to other far-right groups, including the North American Volunteer Militia and the Almost Heaven “survivalist” compound. While the North American Volunteer Militia railed against the “mess” cre- ated by the U.S. government and warns, “We need cleansing . . . we need blood to cleanse us,”89 the millenarian Almost Heaven residents await the inevitable Armageddon. Founded and led by James “Bo” Gritz, formerly a presidential candidate for an extreme right-wing party and a U.S. Spe- cial Forces Vietnam veteran (supposedly the model for Sylvester Stallone’s

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“Rambo” character), this group embraces the same zealous advocacy of fire- arms possession and antigovernment sentiments as the militias, but also believes in a coming apocalypse, for which it prepares by stockpiling weap- ons, food, and valuables and training in survivalist techniques and guerrilla warfare.90 Security is provided by Gritz’s specially created elite SPIKE (Spe- cially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) teams, which according to one knowledgeable observer bear as much resemblance to the mainstream mili- tia organizations as the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (Green Berets) do to the “weekend warriors” of the local National Guards (the American equivalent of Britain’s Territorial Army).91 In April 996 a tense standoff between the FBI and yet another Montana militia, known as the Freemen, was defused and a repetition of the Branch Davidian debacle avoided when eighty-one days of negotiations led to the voluntary surrender of two of the group’s members for whom federal arrest warrants had been issued.

To the south, the Texas-based Big Star One claimed a decade ago to have a military “division-sized” following, with separate “units” deployed across the northern part of the state and into Oklahoma and New Mexico; the Texas Constitutional Militia boasted a membership in the thousands and chapters in some forty counties; and a third militia, known as the Repub- lic of Texas, prosecuted what it described as a “campaign of paper terror- ism”—attempting to throttle state courts with bogus land claims and bad checks—claiming that the United States illegally annexed Texas in 845 and therefore has no jurisdiction over the state.92 The Indiana Militia is described by observers as a particularly militant anti-gun-control organiza- tion; its members proudly once proclaimed that they were “sick and tired of being raped and pillaged by the bunch of thieves that run the federal government”93 and clamor to take matters into their own hands.

The militia movement’s violent ambitions have been clearly illuminated by at least thirteen separate known conspiracies uncovered by federal authorities in the decade since the Oklahoma City bombing, among them the following:

• In 995, seven members of the West Virginia Mountaineer Militia were arrested and charged with plotting to blow up the FBI’s com- puter center in that state.

• Twelve members of an Arizona group known as the Viper Militia were arrested in 996,94 of whom six were later charged with illegal possession of explosives and machine guns along with conspiracy to promote civil disorder. The group is alleged to have plotted for more than two years to blow up seven federal office buildings in Phoenix

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and to this end had carried out detailed reconnaissance, including videotaping of potential target sites. It was in the process of building up a stock of ammonium nitrate fertilizer—such as that used to con- struct the bomb that destroyed the Murrah Building—for this pur- pose. At the time of the arrest, the Vipers had amassed ,900 pounds of the fertilizer;95 the Oklahoma City bomb contained an estimated 4,800 pounds mixed with high-powered racing fuel.96

• Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) arrested three members of the so-called Militia-at-Large for the Republic of Georgia in 996. The three were subsequently convicted of conspiring to “wage war with the government,” with plans including the assassination of senior elected officials and possibly even attacks at the then forthcoming Olympic Games in Atlanta.

• A group of white supremacists, describing themselves as members of the “Phineas Priesthood,” were also arrested in 996 in connection with a string of bombings and bank robberies in Spokane, Washing- ton. Four either pled guilty or were convicted.

• Four Ku Klux Klansmen were arrested in 997 and subsequently con- victed of plotting to blow up a natural-gas processing plant to divert attention from a robbery that they were planning to finance seditious activities.

• Members of a militia group based in both Kansas and Texas were also arrested in 997 and convicted on weapons charges pertaining to a series of planned attacks on U.S. military bases.

• A plot by members of the Michigan-based North American Militia to kill federal agents and unleash a bombing campaign was uncovered during 997–98 and the conspirators arrested and convicted on explo- sives, weapons, and conspiracy charges.

• In 998, members of a white supremacist group, the New Order, were convicted of plotting to “bomb public buildings around the coun- try, rob banks, poison water supplies, and assassinate federal judges and others.”

• Two white supremacists were convicted of planning to instigate a “race war” in 200 by destroying Jewish and African American landmarks.

• In 2003, two antigovernment extremists were convicted of amass- ing a “huge arsenal of illegal weapons and explosives in Tyler, Texas, including suitcase bombs and a working chemical weapon.”97 They apparently possessed sufficient quantities of sodium cyanide to kill some six thousand people and had stockpiled half a million rounds of ammunition and sixty pipe bombs.98

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Finally, American law enforcement agencies uncovered three separate plots in 995 that involved people who had connections to various American Christian white supremacist organizations that sought to obtain deadly tox- ins and contaminants, presumably to use in terrorist attacks. In March, two members of the Minnesota Patriots Council, a militia group, were convicted of stockpiling enough ricin to kill at least 29 people,99 allegedly as part of a plan to murder IRS agents, U.S. marshals, and local deputy sheriffs. Accord- ing to the FBI, ricin is ranked as the third most toxic known substance, behind only plutonium and botulism: a minute amount can kill in minutes if inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through the skin. Two months later, a man described as a certified microbiologist—who also had links to the Aryan Nations—was able to order a quantity of bubonic plague agent through the mail from a Maryland chemical supply firm. He had obtained three vials of Yersinia pestis—a bacterium credited with having wiped out one-third of the population of fourteenth-century Europe. In addition to the bacterium, police found in his home a dozen M-l carbines, smoke grenades, blasting caps—and white supremacist literature.100 And in December, an Arkansas resident with reputed ties to white supremacist survivalist groups in that state was arrested at his farm on charges of having attempted to smuggle 30 grams of ricin into the United States from Canada. Canadian customs officials also discovered in the man’s car four guns and more than twenty thousand rounds of ammunition. When U.S. authorities searched the man’s Arkansas farm, they found copies of the (commercially available) Poisoner’s Handbook, which explains how to extract ricin from castor beans, and Silent Death, which describes how to use toxic compounds to poison people.101

The members of all these groups, it should be noted, are not full-time, “professional” terrorists—like the more familiar Irish, Basque, Middle East- ern, and left-wing extremists active in Europe throughout the past few decades—but consider themselves “minutemen”: ordinary citizens and patriots ready to take up arms at a moment’s notice to defend their inalien- able rights, self-styled heirs of the tradition of the American Revolution. It is therefore significant that the Oklahoma City bombing took place on the date that the American Revolution commenced in Boston 220 years earlier. Indeed, McVeigh actually used this analogy to describe himself and the reasons behind his actions. “Any able-bodied adult male, any patriot,” he told a British journalist, “is responsible for defending his liberty. Just like the Minutemen of the revolution.”102

Although the militias are a relatively recent phenomenon, their pedigree can be traced back to the Posse Comitatus (Latin for “power of the county”) movement founded during the 970s and its 980s offshoot—with which

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McVeigh is also believed to have had ties—the Arizona Patriots. These groups strenuously reject any form of government above the county level and spe- cifically oppose federal and state income taxes, the existence of the Federal Reserve system, and the supremacy of the federal judiciary over local courts. Over the past two decades, local chapters of the Posse Comitatus have been founded in almost every state in this country. The group became increasingly violent, particularly in the American Midwest and the far Northwest, with members attacking local, state, and federal law enforcement officers who were attempting to serve subpoenas or otherwise enforce the law. An attempt to serve a subpoena on North Dakota Posse Comitatus member Gordon Kahl in 983 resulted in the first of many armed confrontations between the radical right and the authorities. In the ensuing shoot-out, Kahl killed two federal marshals before he himself was shot to death.103 Undeterred by Kahl’s death, in December 986 six members of the Arizona Patriots were arrested and subsequently convicted on charges of plotting to bomb an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office in Ogden, Utah, the Los Angeles Federal Building (spe- cifically, the FBI offices located there), and a synagogue in Phoenix, Arizona. Now a new generation of Arizona Patriots is carrying on their predecessors’ campaign. Nightly shortwave radio broadcasts by Patriot leader William Cooper exhort members to resist forcibly the imposition of the “new world order” epitomized by institutions like the United Nations and treaties such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

It would be a mistake, however, to view either the militias or the older Posse Comitatus and Arizona Patriots organizations as simply militant antifederalist or extremist tax-resistance movements. The aims and moti- vations of many of these extremist groups in fact span a broad spectrum of antifederalist and seditious beliefs coupled with religious hatred and racial intolerance, masked by a transparent veneer of religious precepts. Those that also embrace religious and racial intolerance are bound together by the ethos of the broader Christian Patriot movement, which includes:

• hostility to any form of government above the county level; • the vilification of Jews and nonwhites as children of Satan; • an obsession with achieving the religious and racial purification of the

United States; • belief in a conspiracy theory of powerful Jewish interests controlling

the government, banks, and the media; • advocacy of the overthrow of the U.S. government, or the ZOG (Zion-

ist Occupation Government), as the Patriot/militia groups disparag- ingly refer to it.

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Many militia groups’ “field manuals” (literally recycled and repackaged versions of U.S. military training handbooks and genuine field manuals) and other literature quote liberally from Christian scripture in support of their violent activities and use biblical liturgy to justify their paranoid call to arms. A militia recruit recalled in an interview his initiation into the move- ment in a rural Missouri church: “It was odd. It was extremely religious. There were people standing along the aisles carrying weapons, rifles, a few with pistols. We all stood up and walked to the front of the church in this strange procession. We were told that it was part of the ritual of becoming ‘God’s soldiers’ in this ‘holy war.’ One of the organizers of the event then mounted the pulpit declaring, ‘Soon we will be asked to kill, but we will kill with love in our hearts because God is with us.’ ”104

The connecting thread in this seemingly diverse and disparate collec- tion of citizens’ militias, tax resisters, antifederalists, bigots, and racists is the white supremacist religious dogma espoused by the Christian Identity movement, itself based on the “Anglo-Israelism” movement that emerged in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century. The core belief of Anglo- Israelism was that the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel were composed of Anglo-Saxons, not Jews. However, in marked contrast to the present-day Christian Identity movement in the United States, nineteenth-century Anglo-Israelism embraced an entirely pacifist doctrine. The basic tenets of the contemporary American version of the Identity movement include the beliefs that:

• Jesus Christ was not a Semite but an Aryan; • the lost tribes of Israel are composed not of Jews but of “blue-eyed

Aryans”; • white Anglo-Saxons and not Jews are the true “Chosen People”; and • the United States is the “Promised Land.”

In this context, Jews are viewed as impostors and children of Satan who must be exterminated.

Identity theology, combined with militant tax resistance and a form of regressive populism, figures prominently in the Christian Patriotism doc- trine subscribed to by the “marching” militia groups today. The ideologi- cal heir to the Posse Comitatus with its hard-line antifederalist principles, Christian Patriotism goes one step further by embracing a salient theologi- cal component that combines Identity interpretation of scripture with the myth of the Illuminati—the global conspiracy theory first promulgated in the late eighteenth century with respect to Freemasons and later adapted

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to include the Jews, worldwide banking interests, and other dark, mystical forces. According to its modern-day American interpretation, the “two seed” theory embraced by Christian Patriotism, there are two races on earth: one godly and one satanic—the former comprising white Anglo-Saxon Chris- tians and the latter Jews and all nonwhites. The movement further believes in the moral and legal force of a form of “common law” derived from a syn- thesis of the Magna Carta, the original articles of the U.S. Constitution, and the American Bill of Rights, and it also regards all paper money as “fraudu- lent” and holds that gold and silver are the only legitimate means of trade. McVeigh, it should be noted, openly admitted to interviewers his belief in Christian Patriotism and involvement in Patriot activities.105

At the nexus of Identity, Christian Patriotism, and the militia move- ments for the past three decades has been the organization called the Aryan Nations. An extremist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi group of white supremacists, survivalists, and militant tax resisters, the Aryan Nations has its head- quarters on a secluded, fenced-in forty-acre site at the edge of the Coeur d’Alene National Forest in Hayden Lake, Idaho. It was founded in 974 by the Reverend Richard Girnt Butler, a former aeronautical engineer from California who had moved to Idaho the previous year. Under his direction, the Aryan Nations performs a function similar to that of the PLO, acting as an umbrella group for like-minded organizations, among which it pro- vides a coordinating and liaison function. To this end, Aryan Nations con- gresses were held almost every year between 973 and the 990s—except for 985, when widespread arrests of members of a radical splinter group, calling itself the Order, dealt a stunning, albeit temporary blow to the white supremacist movement. MOM’s leader, John Trochmann, for example, was a featured speaker at the 990 event.

Today, the Aryan Nations is a shadow of its former self. It is still reel- ing from the dual blows of Butler’s death in 2004 and a lawsuit four years earlier that forced the movement to pay $6.3 million in damages to Victoria and Jason Keenan. The Keenans, who had been assaulted by Aryan Nations security guards, also took possession of the organization’s Hayden Lake compound. They subsequently sold the property to a philanthropist, who then donated it to a local community college.106 Nonetheless, the Aryan Nations still continues to oversee at least seventeen local chapters across the United States.107 Its hate-filled Web site remains up and running as well. One recent statement, for instance, declares that “all means are justified to restore Aryan honor,” calling for a racial “holy war” that “can only end in total victory or total defeat,”108 while another statement elucidates how

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Christian theology justifies its own variant of “jihad,” citing biblical text in support of its theological arguments for a religious war.109

The Aryan Nations ideology evidences the same mixture of racist and seditious dicta as is common throughout the American Christian Patriot movement. “WE BELIEVE,” a 980s-era brochure titled This Is Aryan Nations explained,

there is a battle being fought this day between the children of darkness (today known as Jews) and the children of light (God), the Aryan race, the true Israel of the Bible. . . .

WE BELIEVE in the preservation of our race individually and col- lectively as a people as demanded and directed by God. We believe a racial nation has a right and is under obligation to preserve itself and its members. . . . As His divine race, we have been commissioned to fulfill His divine purpose and plans. . . .

WE BELIEVE that there is a day of reckoning. The usurper will be thrown out by the terrible might of Yahweh’s people as they return to their roots and their special destiny.110

Indeed, the “Aryan National State Platform” cites as article 8: “A ruthless war must be waged against any whose activities are injurious to the com- mon interest.”111

This “cleansing” of the United States forms an immutable point of refer- ence for the Christian Patriots’ ideology. “Aliens are pouring over as a flood into each of our ancestral lands,” Butler warned, “threatening dispossession of the heritage, culture, and very life blood of our posterity. . . . We know that as we return to our Father’s natural Life Order, all power, prosperity, and liberty again comes to us as our possession, to establish justice for- ever on earth.”112 In promotional literature from its heyday in the 980s, the group proclaims its desire to “make clear to ourselves and our enemies what we intend to do: We will have a national racial state at whatever price in blood is necessary. Just as our forefathers purchased their freedom in blood, so must we.” The leaflet went on to decry “the leadership of mali- cious, bastardizing politicians . . . [in] modern, decadent America [where] millions of whites watch in abject dismay and hopelessness as their great culture, heritage and civilization evaporates in the steaming stinking, seeth- ing milieu of so many alien races, cultures and gods.”113 Robert Matthews, the deceased leader of the Order, once declared that in order to stem this tide, all Jews, blacks, Hispanics, and other “mud people,” along with white

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“race traitors,” must be exterminated in what he described as “a racial and religious Armageddon.”114

It is particularly alarming that the Christian Patriots’ expressed raison d’être—the cocktail of racism, anti-Semitism, and sedition—is justified and legitimated on theological grounds. It is at once a political and a grassroots religious movement. The leaders of individual groups within it are indeed often themselves clergymen—like the Michigan Militia’s founder and “gen- eral,” Pastor Norman Olson; the Idaho-based Aryan Nations’ leader, Rever- end Richard Girnt Butler; and the Ku Klux Klan’s Pastor Thorn Robb—who deliberately flaunt their clerical titles in order to endow their organizations with a theological veneer that condones and justifies violence. In an article from the 980s titled “An All White Nation?—Why Not?” Reverend Roy B. Masker, for example, explains how Aryan Nations members “are in disobe- dience to our Father and God, Yahwey, for allowing the Nation He gave us to become the mongrelized cesspool in which we now find ourselves. . . . In- deed, it is incumbent upon us to BUILD A NEW, ALL-WHITE NATION! We are under command to do so! All scripture demands it!” Masker con- cludes with the admonition “Woe to those who stand in the way of the Aryan juggernaut!”115

The Christian Patriots do not appear to recognize any of the politi- cal, moral, or practical considerations that constrain most other terrorist groups from causing mass death and destruction. There are, in fact, striking parallels between these groups and religiously motivated Islamic Shi’a and messianic Jewish fanatics in the Middle East. All of these groups transform abstract political ideologies and objectives into a religious imperative. Vio- lence is not merely sanctioned; it is divinely decreed. The killing of those described as “infidels” by the Shi’a, “dogs” by the Jews, or “children of Satan” by the Christian Patriots becomes a sacramental act.

Although the Christian Patriots have so far caused far less death, destruc- tion, and bloodshed than their Islamic terrorist counterparts, evidence has come to light that at least some of the movement’s key figures had laid plans to engage in indiscriminate mass killing. For example, an indictment handed down by a U.S. federal grand jury in 987 alleged that fifteen representatives of groups from throughout the United States and Canada met at the Aryan Nations headquarters in Idaho in 983 to plot the forcible overthrow of the federal government and the creation of a separate Aryan nation within the United States. The indictment stated that they planned to “carry out assas- sinations of federal officials, politicians and Jews, as well as bombings and polluting of municipal water supplies [emphasis added].”116 Any doubts of their seriousness of purpose were dispelled when police and federal agents

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raided a white supremacist compound in rural Arkansas in April 984 and discovered a stockpile of some thirty gallons of cyanide to be used to poison reservoirs in Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.117

An identical scenario, in fact, is detailed in the novel The Turner Dia- ries,118 written by William Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew MacDon- ald, which has been cited both as “the Bible” of the Christian Patriots119 and as a major influence on McVeigh in his planning of the Murrah Building bombing.120 The book describes a chain of events that begins with a white supremacist revolution in 99 and culminates two years later in “an all-out race war” and worldwide nuclear conflagration. A terrorist group called the Order embarks on a ruthless campaign of violence involving the assassina- tion of public officials and prominent Jews, the shooting down of commer- cial airliners, the poisoning of water supplies, and bombings of public utili- ties. The book reaches its climax when the terrorists seize the U.S. nuclear arsenal and obliterate several American cities before turning the weapons on targets in Israel and the Soviet Union.

Turner’s tale, although fictional, is in many ways of a kind with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which was not taken seriously at the time, only to be turned into terrible reality a mere ten years after its publication. In fact, as incredible and lunatic as the events described in The Turner Diaries may seem, the strategy of the inchoate terrorist campaign waged in the United States between 983 and 984 by Robert Matthews and the real-life Order was based entirely on the battle plan detailed in the book. In another exam- ple of life imitating art, MOM’s two-hundred-page manual reportedly reads exactly like a blueprint for battle copied out of The Turner Diaries, detailing plans for how to:

• paralyze America’s entire economy, including its agricultural and industrial sectors and transport and communications systems;

• assassinate prominent “artists and sports figures” and other leading personalities as a “useful form of propaganda for the revolutionary and patriot principles”;

• eliminate spies and traitorous government officials; and • generally foment “an air of nervousness, discredit, insecurity, uncer-

tainty, and concern on the part of government.”121

The bizarre apocalyptic vision of The Turner Diaries has long formed an integral part of the beliefs of white supremacists, Christian Patriots, and militia adherents. Whereas most people, for example, harbor deep fears of a nuclear war, many white supremacists appear to welcome the

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prospect as an opportunity to eliminate their avowed “enemies” and per- mit the fulfillment of their objectives to create a new world order peopled exclusively by the white race. The self-described purpose of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord’s former compound at Mountain Home, Arkansas (where the cyanide was discovered), was “to build an Ark for God’s people during the coming tribulations on the earth.”122 Accord- ingly, the hundred or so men, women, and children who lived in the compound prepared themselves for the coming Armageddon by stockpil- ing weapons, food, and valuables and undergoing training in survivalist techniques and guerrilla warfare. As Pastor Terry Noble, a spokesman for the group, once explained, “We are Christian survivalists who believe in preparing for the ultimate holocaust. . . . The coming war is a step toward God’s government.”123

The influence that apocalyptic revelations and millenarian imperatives exerted over many of these groups may be seen in the “DIY [do-it-your- self ] apocalypse kit” marketed by MOM. The kit reportedly contained such detailed instructions as the need to build at least two concealed and well- protected “fall-out” shelters, stockpile enough food to last for at least a year, and arm oneself with, at the very minimum, a Colt AR-5 assault rifle and six hundred rounds of .223 ammunition as well as at least one 9 mm–type Beretta automatic pistol with no fewer than two hundred bullets. A can opener, a toothbrush, and thermal underwear are the other recommended essentials—with MOM offering for sale such additional optional gear as a military surplus NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) protective suit (available in green only) for fifty dollars.124

These beliefs involving the inevitability of Armageddon are actively encouraged by proselytizers of Dominion theology, the most recent rein- terpretation of Christian Identity doctrine circulating among the Christian Patriots. Dominion theology has been described by one knowledgeable observer as a “post-millennial Bible-based doctrine” incorporating the main tenets of Identity dogma. Thus, in addition to anti-Semitism and racism, Dominionists believe that it is incumbent upon each individual to hasten redemption by working actively to ensure the return of the Messiah (in the Dominionists’ vision, Christ). Only by accelerating the inevitable apoca- lypse, Dominionists contend, will the tribulations that currently afflict the American Christian white man end. The apocalypse will be followed by a thousand-year period of rule by Christians, at the end of which Christ will return to earth.125

The abiding link between religion and violence was most clearly demon- strated at the conference sponsored by a leading Identity and Dominionist

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figure, Reverend Pete Peters,126 in Estes Park, Colorado, in October 992.127 At that meeting, Louis Beam—one of the preeminent figures in American white supremacism—defined the violent strategy of “leaderless resistance” for the militia movement. Beam, a Vietnam veteran and former Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, whose close ties with Butler led to his appointment as the Aryan Nations’ ambassador-at-large, has long been at the cutting edge of white supremacist violent activism. It was he who, in the early 980s, pioneered the use of computer bulletin boards as a means for like-minded hatemongers both to communicate with one another and to circulate literature and information otherwise outlawed by the U.S. and Canadian postal services. Beam was thus well positioned to take the Ameri- can white supremacist movement into the twenty-first century, making full use of the advanced capabilities of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Information and literature from obscure organizations that was once dif- ficult to obtain therefore has been made readily available over the Inter- net to millions; for example, the Aryan Nations can offer its materials to a huge audience via its Web site. Beam’s concept of “leaderless resistance” was designed to avoid the mistakes of the past, when traditional-type ter- rorist groups like the Order were created to prosecute the white-race revo- lution, only to be undermined and ultimately neutralized by arrests and informants. Accordingly, Beam proposed that “phantom cell networks” or “autonomous leadership units” (ALUs) be established that would operate completely independently of one another but, through their individual ter- rorist acts, would eventually join together to create a chain reaction leading to a nationwide white supremacist revolution.

The object of “leaderless resistance,” Beam has explained, is to “defeat state tyranny.”128 The concept is taken from the white supremacist adventure novel Hunter, William Pierce’s sequel to The Turner Diaries (again written under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald). The impact of the strategy on the militia movement has been profound. For example, the “field manual” produced by “the Free Militia” in Wisconsin—typical of the genre—states the following:

THE FUNDAMENTAL RULE GUIDING THE ORGANIZATION OF THE FREE MILITIA IS [NOT] GENER ALIZED PRINCIPLES AND PL AN- NING BUT DECENTR ALIZED TACTICS AND ACTION.

What is meant by this key statement is that the whole Militia must be committed to the same cause and coordinated in their joint defense of a community. . . . The way a balance between these competing concerns is achieved in the Free Militia is to organize all elements into “cells.”129

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Similarly, in an address to a meeting of the Washington State Militia in January 996, MOM’s John Trochmann was quoted as saying: “If the enemy forces have no idea what’s . . . in store for them if they come to our back- yard . . . leave the element of surprise on your side. Not everyone has to stand up publicly. Go with the cell structure in some of your areas—have a ball. Let them guess what’s going on for a change, instead of us.”130

The latest incarnation of the fusion of religion and hate is believed to be the previously mentioned shadowy militant Christian Patriot activist-warriors known as the Phineas Priesthood. The name is taken from the Old Testament (Numbers 25), which recounts how a man named Phineas became an avenger priest by murdering a Midianite woman (named Zimri) whom he discovered having sex with her Israelite (Jewish) lover. The biblical tale is taken by some modern-day Christian anti-abortion extremists cum Identity adherents as a decree against “race-mixing” and a summons to “strike down those who are viewed as enemies of the pure white race.”131 The Phineas Priests’ self-appointed mission is allegedly to impose what they believe is “God’s law” on earth: that is, the enforcement of prohibitions against interracial marriage, homosexual- ity, and abortion and an end to the federal banking system. They are reported to be highly secretive: so little is known about the Priests that it is not even certain whether they are an actual group or organization or a loose association of like-minded individuals adhering to the wider movement’s “leaderless resis- tance” or “phantom cells” strategy, or whether the name is simply a mysterious title adopted by individual Christian Patriot groups to confuse and mislead the authorities.132 Joe Roy, the director of Klanwatch (a group that monitors hate crimes in America), believes that the Priests do genuinely exist, describing them as “zealots who truly believe they are commanded by God to carry out a revolution in the United States to restore ‘God’s law.’ ”133

Whatever the actual status of the Priesthood, a clear convergence of reli- gious terrorism and violence against homosexuals and abortion clinics and their staffs has been evident on several occasions in recent years.134 In 994, for example, a Christian fundamentalist minister named Paul Hill shot to death a clinic doctor and his escort in Pensacola, Florida. In his book Should We Defend Born and Unborn Children with Force? Hill cites Phineas’s bibli- cal mission and writes of the need for a vigilante underground to punish all who “disobey God’s law” on abortion or homosexuality and engage in other forms of blasphemous behavior.135 The Priesthood was also invoked by Christian Patriots in defense of the slaying of three customers at a gay book- store in Shelby, North Carolina, in 99, and it surfaced again in connection with a series of bank robberies and bombings that took place between April and July 996 in Spokane, Washington. Three men were subsequently con-

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victed for bombing a Planned Parenthood clinic (where abortions are per- formed), a local newspaper’s offices, and a bank, as well as twice robbing the same bank to the tune of $08,000 (a sum that was never recovered). At the scene of some of their attacks the gang left a two-page printed document, signed with the mark of the “Phineas Priests.” The document espouses both Dominionist and Identity liturgy, before concluding with the warning:

Let the high praises of Yahweh [God] be in their mouth, and a two- edged sword in their hand; to execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people: To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron: To execute upon them the judgement written . . .

Flee you usurer from the face of our land, and all that would not that the Master should reign over them, for the end of Babylon is come. Praise Yahweh!136

It should be noted that the uncompromising antigovernment fervor, aggressive racism, and strident anti-Semitism espoused by the American Christian Patriot movement has not been restricted to the United States. The racist British group Combat 8 (which takes its name from the first and eighth letters of the alphabet—Adolf Hitler’s initials), for example, appar- ently openly emulates the American militias and Christian Patriot move- ments, advocating attacks on the police and other symbols of governmental authority. Its founder, Harold Covington, is, however, an American, and the group’s mailing address is a post office box number in Raleigh, North Carolina.137 And in Australia, militia groups patterned on the American model have reportedly been established using an organizational blueprint provided by MOM.138

Today, the American white supremacist movement seems a spent force. The National Alliance, which is reputed to be the largest remaining orga- nization, currently has only about ,500 members,139 and the number of militia groups has declined appreciably, from the 900 or so thought to have existed around the time of the Oklahoma City bombing in 995 to just 50 today. Moreover, the deaths of both Butler and William Pierce in 2002 denuded the movement of perhaps its two best-known leaders. In addition, Robert Millar, another prominent figure in the American white suprema- cist universe, who headed a white supremacist/survivalist compound in northeastern Oklahoma called Elohim City, passed away in 200. And the subsequent conviction and imprisonment of Matthew Hale, whose World Church of the Creator was founded on the premise that only “white people

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are the creators of all worthwhile culture and civilization,” removed from contention at least one would-be successor to Butler et al.140

At the same time, however, the movement has long demonstrated a remarkable resiliency and durability—combined with a proclivity for sharp, sudden spasms of violence—that cannot easily be discounted. Indeed, the deaths and imprisonment of these leaders and the declines in the number of nationwide chapters and overall membership do not appear to have been accompanied by a diminution in fervor or commitment among hardcore followers. According to MOM’s David Trochmann, the remaining organiza- tions are no less resolute and are still just as determined: they are just “much more private” and careful in expressing their views and organizational affili- ations.141 The National Alliance, for example, may have fewer members than before, but it still maintains chapters in some thirty states across the country.142 Further, as noted in chapter , the FBI today is especially con- cerned about the threat from “lone wolves” like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, neither of whom actually belonged to a white supremacist group, much less any existing terrorist group, but who were nevertheless clearly motivated and inspired by these organizations and their leaders to engage in violence.143 Rudolph pled guilty in April 2005 to killing 2 people and injur- ing 50 others in a series of bombings that included the 996 Olympics and a gay club in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.144 Like McVeigh, Rudolph was not himself a white supremacist, but he shared the beliefs and positions of that movement in this instance on issues such as legalized abortion and hatred of global institutions like the Olympic Games that, to Rudolph’s mind, promoted the “despicable ideals [of ] global socialism.”145

Cults

The special potential of terrorism motivated by a religious imperative to cause mass indiscriminate killing has been perhaps most clearly demon- strated by the ominous activities of various religious cults and sects in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere since the 980s. While the attention of law enforcement officials, government intelligence agencies, and security services was focused firmly on the more visible threat presented by famil- iar terrorist adversaries in the traditional ideological and ethno-national- ist/separatist groups, members of these organizations were already poised to cross the threshold of terrorist use of either weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or mass annihilation.

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In 984, for example, a nonlethal but disturbingly portentous incident occurred in the small Oregon town of Dalles. Followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (an ascetic Indian mystic who, in addition to amassing a collection of ninety-three Rolls-Royce automobiles, had established a large religious commune nearby) contaminated the salad bars of ten restaurants with salmonella bacteria in hopes of debilitating the local populace and thereby rigging a key municipal election in the cult’s favor. Although the plot to “take over the county” failed,146 75 people became ill, and 45 of them required hospitalization. Moreover, evidence subsequently came to light that the restaurant contaminations were in fact a test run for a more ambitious plot to poison the town’s water supply.147 The Rajneeshis’148 suc- cessful cultivation and effective dispersal of the bacteria clearly suggested the ease with which lethal agents could potentially be produced and dis- seminated in even larger population centers.149

The release of deadly nerve gas on the Tokyo underground in March 995 not only confirmed those fears but also marked a significant historical watershed in terrorist tactics and weaponry. Previously, most terrorists had shown an aversion to the esoteric and exotic weapons of mass destruction popularized in fictional thrillers or depicted in action-hero films and televi- sion shows. Radical in their politics, the majority of terrorists were equally conservative in their methods of operation. Indeed, from the time of the late-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries and the Fenian dynamit- ers who terrorized Victorian-era London, terrorists have continued to rely almost exclusively on the same two weapons: the gun and the bomb. The sarin-induced deaths of a dozen Tokyo commuters and the injuries inflicted on nearly four thousand others may have changed that forever.

The Aum Shinrikyo (Aum “Supreme Truth” sect)150 arguably represents a new kind of terrorist threat, posed not by traditional secular adversaries but by a mass religious movement motivated by a mystical, almost transcenden- tal, divinely inspired imperative. The group was founded in 987 by Shoko Asahara. A partially blind, hitherto unexceptional purveyor of supposedly medicinal herbs (who in 982 was fined eight hundred dollars and sentenced to twenty days’ incarceration after conviction for selling fake cures) and owner of a chain of yoga schools in Japan, Asahara had emerged as a self-anointed prophet after a trip to the Himalayas the previous year. His messianic inclina- tions were subsequently encouraged by a vision he had while meditating on a beach after returning to Japan. According to Asahara, the Shiva God sent a “message” to him that he had been chosen to “lead God’s army.” Ashara believed that he had been ordained an Abiraketsu no mikoto, an ancient “light god,” and given the divine task of establishing the “Kingdom of

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Shambhala”—a utopian community populated only by those who had achieved psychic powers.151 Not long after this experience, Asahara fortuitously fell into conversation with an eccentric historian he met at a mountainside spiritual retreat. The historian told him that Armageddon would come at the end of the century, that “only a merciful, godly race will survive,” and that “the leader of this race will emerge in Japan.” Asahara immediately knew that he was the person destined to be that leader. Transformed by this revelation, he changed his name from the plain-sounding Chizuo Matsumoto to the apparently more suitably spiritual Shoko Asahara.152

Shortly afterward, with just ten followers, Asahara opened the first Aum office. The new sect grew rapidly, tapping into the peculiarly Japanese fascination with mystical, obscure religious sects that combine the spiri- tual with the supernatural. Indeed, according to one account, at that time approximately 83,000 different religious cults already existed in Japan.153 Aum’s highly idiosyncratic mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism fused with notions of apocalyptic redemption exerted a powerful attraction for young, intelligent Japanese alienated by society’s preoccupation with work, suc- cess, technology, and making money. Hence, by the end of 987 Aum had fifteen hundred members with branches in several Japanese cities,154 and by 989 double that number.155 In less than a decade, it would have some ten thousand members, organized within twenty-four branches scattered throughout Japan, alongside an estimated twenty to thirty thousand follow- ers in Russia alone,156 with an additional ten to twenty thousand converts in at least six other countries157 and offices in New York, Germany, Australia, and Sri Lanka.

From the start, Asahara preached about the inevitability of an impending apocalypse, stressing his unique messianic mission and variously describ- ing himself as “Today’s Christ,” “the saviour of This Century,”158 and “the one and only person who had acquired supreme truth.”159 By 994 these delusions of power and authority had led Asahara to believe that he should be king of Japan, claiming the mantle of Zhu Yuanzhang, a fourteenth-cen- tury Chinese religious leader who created the Ming dynasty.160 Particu- lar emphasis was given to the Hindu god of destruction and subsequent regeneration, Shiva, whose fifteen-foot visage dominated the entrance to the Satian-7 laboratory where the group manufactured the sarin nerve gas used in the subway attack. To round out his preoccupation with proph- esied cataclysmic events, Asahara also borrowed Judeo-Christian notions of Armageddon and frequently cited the apocalyptic predictions of the six- teenth-century French astrologer Nostradamus, whose recently translated works had become best sellers in Japan. According to Asahara, the world

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would end—but he was never sure exactly when, variously fixing 993, 997, 999, 2000, and 2003 as likely times. Whatever the date, Asahara was certain that Armageddon would be caused by a Third World War. Citing his otherworldly abilities of both “astral vision and intuitive wisdom,” he proclaimed before an Aum conference in 987 that nuclear war was “sure to break out” between 999 and 2003. This catastrophe could be averted, Asahara assured his followers, provided that they worked actively to estab- lish an Aum branch in every country in the world. “Spread the training system of Aum on a global scale and scatter Buddhas over the world,” he advised. “Then we can avoid World War III for sure. I guarantee it.”161 From these apocalyptic predictions sprang Asahara’s obsession with American enmity toward the Japanese in general and himself in particular. “As we move toward the year 2000,” an Aum pamphlet warned, “there will be a series of events of inexpressible ferocity and terror. The lands of Japan will be transformed into a nuclear wasteland. Between 996 and January 998, America and its allies will attack Japan, and only 0 percent of the popula- tion of the major cities will survive.”162 Indeed, Asahara regularly blamed the United States for all of Japan’s economic and social problems, as well as for attempting to destroy his own health. According to the testimony of Aum’s former “Director of Intelligence,” Yoshihiro Inoue, Ashara had stated that after overthrowing the Japanese government and seizing power, the movement’s real challenge would be to deal with the U.S. military forces stationed in the country.163 An intrinsic element of all these claimed plots was Asahara’s fascination with nerve gas. “I come under a gas attack wher- ever I travel,” he reportedly once declared, drawing a connection between the “jet fighters from the US forces [that] fly for exercises around Mt Fuji” and his alleged medical problems.164

Asahara thus deliberately fostered a climate of paranoiac expectation within the cult, driven by the same Manichean worldview embraced by other religious terrorist movements, with its conviction of the world as a battleground between good and evil. The sect’s avowed enemies gradually expanded to include not only the predatory U.S. government and its min- ions in the Japanese government (who, Asahara alleged, were responsible for causing the January 995 Kobe earthquake), but also a mysterious inter- national cabal of Freemasons, Jews, and financiers. Asahara’s adherence to the same far-fetched conspiracy theories promulgated by the American Christian Patriot movement is perhaps not entirely surprising given that he was also an unabashed admirer of Hitler and a fervent believer in the conspiratorial fantasies spun by such well-known anti-Semitic works as the turn-of-the-century forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

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In books such as Disaster Approaches the Land of the Rising Sun: Shoko Asahara’s Apocalyptic Predictions, Asahara warned that Armageddon would be precipitated by a poisonous gas cloud dispatched from the United States that would engulf Japan.165 Thereafter, a cataclysmic global conflict would erupt—involving both nerve gas and nuclear weapons—that, in words reminiscent of Hitler’s proclaimed “thousand-year Reich,” would lead to a thousand years of peace, after which the appearance of a new messiah would create a “paradise on earth.”166 In 993, however, Asahara suddenly began to proclaim that the forthcoming apocalypse could be averted if Aum took proper action. “We need a lot of weapons to prevent Armageddon,” he reportedly told his closest aides. “And we must prepare them quickly.”167

Thus Aum embarked on its program to acquire an array of conventional and nonconventional weaponry that would effectively dwarf the arsenals of most established nation-states’ standing forces. To achieve this goal, the group recruited scientists and technical experts from Japan, Russia (includ- ing two nuclear scientists), and other countries. In contrast to Asahara’s lack of higher education—in 977 he failed to win a place at Japan’s best university, the University of Tokyo, and therefore immersed himself more fervently in yoga and his Oriental medical practice168—these individuals brought to Aum’s projects superb credentials, including advanced degrees from their respective countries’ most prestigious universities and research institutions. Among the Japanese recruited to Aum, for instance, was Sei- ichi Endo, Aum’s “Minister of Public Health.” Endo was a veterinarian and then a Ph.D. student at Kyoto University, considered the country’s best university in the natural sciences, where he studied virology and genetic engineering. At Aum, he led the team of scientists tasked with developing biological weapons, including botulinum and anthrax.169 Ikuo Hayashi, the “Minister of Medicine” and one of the five perpetrators of the subway nerve gas attack, had studied medicine at Keio University, one of Japan’s best pri- vate universities. He subsequently held appointments as a heart specialist at the Keio University hospital and at the Henry Ford Heart and Vascular Institute in Detroit, Michigan. Hayashi was director of the Department of Circulatory Organs at the Japanese National Sanatorium when he joined the cult and was made director of Aum’s own hospital. His responsibilities included administering drugs—including powerful hallucinogens and elec- troshock therapy—to “brainwash” recalcitrant group members and make them more compliant.170 Another prominent Aum physician, Tomomasa Nakagawa, according to Robert J. Lifton, “became a visionary planner of large-scale killing” for Asahara. And Fumihiro Joyu, a telecommunications specialist who had been employed by Japan’s space agency, became the cult’s

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spokesman.171 What all the Japanese recruits had in common, according to Mayuka Yamazaki, was that

before joining Aum, they had questions about their lives. Some of them knew they were not outstanding enough to reach the pinnacle of Japanese society, some realized the limitations of their occupation and some were frustrated with their surroundings which [were] either boring or unfair. Aum effectively approached these young, intelligent but depressed elites, proposing to provide status, money, facilities and the tremendous oppor- tunities to allow them to explore their potential capability to the maxi- mum, and made them believe they could find themselves in Aum.172

Moreover, with its vast financial reserves (Aum’s assets exceeded an estimated $ billion,173 and when the police searched Asahara’s office, they reportedly discovered 22 pounds of gold and about £5 million in cash),174 the sect was able to purchase whatever additional knowledge and resources its members lacked. Prime contractors in this respect were the Russian KGB’s elite Alpha Group, the equivalent of the British SAS or American Delta Force, whose expertise in counterterrorist tactics (the group was established as a direct result of the Munich Olympics incident) and clan- destine warfare (including sabotage, assassination, kidnapping, and intel- ligence and counterintelligence techniques) was imparted to Aum activists. Additional personnel from Russia’s other military special operations force, known as Spetsnaz, reportedly provided further training in martial arts, escape and evasion techniques, and the use of various small arms, including rocket launchers and assault rifles. Aum is also thought to have purchased large quantities of small arms from KGB stocks and to have been in the market for such advanced weaponry as T-72 tanks, MiG-29 jet fighters, an SL-3 Proton rocket launcher and even a nuclear bomb. What is known is that Aum succeeded in obtaining a surplus twin-turbine Mi-7 helicop- ter, complete with chemical spray dispersal devices. The group had ambi- tious plans—and had already acquired sophisticated robotic manufacturing devices—to produce at least one thousand “knock-off versions” of Russia’s world-famous AK-47 assault rifle, along with one million bullets. It had also perfected the manufacture of TNT and the central component of plastic explosives, RDX.175 The group spent 90 million yen (about $9 million) on its manufacturing facilities for automatic weapons and another 34 million yen (about $3.4 million) to construct the Satian-7 facility.176

Aum’s intentions, however, went far beyond a revolution facilitated by con- ventional armaments alone: it also armed itself with a panoply of chemical

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and biological warfare agents and had (unrequited) nuclear aspirations. When the police raided the sect’s laboratories after the nerve gas attack on the Tokyo underground, they found enough sarin to kill an estimated 4.2 million people. In addition, Aum either had already produced or had plans to develop other nerve gases such as VX, tabun, and soman; chemi- cal warfare agents such as mustard gas and sodium cyanide; and biological warfare agents that included anthrax, the highly contagious disease known as Q-fever, and possibly the deadly Ebola virus as well.177 Authorities also found 00 grams of the psychedelic drug LSD—the equivalent of one mil- lion doses—and 3 kilograms of mescaline, among other hallucinatory and stimulant drugs.178 As previously noted, these drugs, as well as electroshock therapy, were administered to punish cult members either for attempting to leave the cult or for even making contact with outsiders. These “brainwash- ing” treatments involved massive doses of LSD, which in some instances resulted in severe memory loss and other psychological dysfunction.179 Aum’s most ambitious project was without doubt its attempt to develop a nuclear capability. To this end, the group had purchased a 500,000-acre sheep station (known as Banjawarn Station) in a remote part of Western Australia. There, they hoped to mine uranium, which was to be shipped back to Aum’s laboratories in Japan, where scientists using laser enrichment technology would convert it into weapons-grade nuclear material. The rea- son for a massive explosion that occurred near Aum’s Australian holdings on May 28, 993, which lit up the sky for miles and caused shock waves felt hundreds of miles away, is still unexplained but may have been related to Aum’s nuclear research and development activities.

“With the use of sarin we shall eradicate major cities,” Asahara had declared, and on the morning of March 20, 995, his disciples put his deadly plan into action. The date was much sooner than had been expected, but Aum informants inside the National Police Agency had warned that the police were about to search the cult’s compounds, and so Asahara suddenly ordered the planned attack to be brought forward in hopes of thwarting the impending raids and completely derailing the intensifying police investi- gation into Aum’s activities.180 At approximately eight o’clock on Monday morning, in the midst of rush hour, selected Aum cadres placed eleven pack- ages containing sarin nerve gas on five subway trains on the Eidan Chiyoda, Hibiya, and Marunouchi lines. The trains were scheduled to converge within four minutes of one another at Kasumigaseki central station: the terminus at the heart of the Japanese government, used daily by the thousands of office workers employed in the country’s most important ministries—including the National Police Agency. Eyewitnesses reported that some of the contain-

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ers appeared to be ordinary lunch boxes or soft-drink flasks, while others were nylon trash bags wrapped in newspaper. In at least one instance, a man was observed stabbing his package with the sharpened tip of an umbrella, thus releasing the nerve gas. Almost immediately, passengers were affected by the noxious fumes: some were quickly overcome, others were afflicted with nosebleeds, oral hemorrhaging, uncontrollable coughing fits, or con- vulsions. In all, fifteen stations and three separate subway lines were affected. The casualties might even have been far greater had not favorable weather conditions fortuitously combined with hastened—and therefore perhaps botched—preparations that likely reduced the sarin’s potency.

Amazingly, this was neither the first nor the last Aum attack to employ chemical or biological warfare agents. In April 990 the group had attempted to realize one of Asahara’s dire prophecies of an impending catastrophe by staging an attack with botulinum toxin. Using an aerosol device developed by Aum’s scientists to disperse the poison over a wide area, the sect tar- geted downtown Tokyo and specifically the Diet (parliament) building. The toxin, however, proved ineffective. Another attempt to disperse botulinum in downtown Tokyo failed in June, as did a suspected Aum plot to spread anthrax the following month. Then, in June 994, the group had tried to kill three judges presiding over a civil suit brought against Aum in the rural resort town of Matsumoto. The plan was to spray sarin into a block of flats where the judges were sleeping. Seven people were killed, and more than 250 others were admitted to the hospital with nerve-gas-induced symp- toms. Though taken seriously ill, the judges survived. Incredible as it seems, a report previously issued by a special unit of the Tokyo metropolitan police department’s criminal investigation laboratory pointing to the presence of the nerve gas apparently went ignored—despite repeated local complaints of strange odors emanating from the sect’s nearby compound, alongside various unexplained disappearances of former Aum members and individu- als who had attempted to investigate the sect’s activities. Instead, the man who first reported the incident was branded as the culprit and accused of accidentally mixing some noxiously fatal concoction of weed killer.181 Finally, in a last spasm of activity designed to avert the governmental onslaught directed at Aum in the wake of the underground attacks, members of the sect attempted to stage a chemical attack using hydrogen cyanide—more infamously known as Zyklon B, the same type of gas used by the Nazis at Auschwitz during the Second World War to murder tens of thousands of people—on May 5, the national “Children’s Day” holiday.

Aum’s objective, however, was not, as many have described it, wanton, mass indiscriminate murder as an end in itself, but the acquisition and

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unimpeded exercise of political power. Theological treatise and religious imperatives clearly played a preeminent role in the justification behind and motivation for Aum’s campaign of violence and subversion. But killing for the sake of killing was not the engine driving Asahara’s and the movement’s grandiose ambitions. Indeed, it was Asahara’s frustrations in pursuing legal, democratic means of change and influence that arguably drove him to embrace terrorism. As an adolescent, he had boasted of his desire one day to become the prime minister of Japan.182 And in 989 he presaged his entry into politics, explaining in Mahayana, Aum’s magazine, “We have to com- plement what we cannot achieve religiously by [a] political approach.”183 In 990, accordingly, together with twenty-five other Aum members, Asahara stood for election to Japan’s House of Representatives as members of the Shinri Tou (Supreme Truth) Party.184 Asahara was certain that he would win,185 and he became deeply embittered by his defeat, claiming that the Japanese government had interfered to deprive him of the victory he had rightly won. Thereafter he became obsessed with exacting revenge by seiz- ing power.186

On December 5, 995, the Japanese prime minister, invoking a 952 anti- subversion law, ordered Aum disbanded and seized all its assets. Although a court later ruled that the Anti-Subversive Activities Act did not apply to religious movements like Aum, new legislation—the “Regulation Against the Group Which Conducted Indiscriminate Massive Murder Attack” (Dantai Kisei Ho)—was enacted in 999 that provided the authorities with new, strengthened powers to monitor and curtail the activities of groups like Aum.187 Asahara and his lieutenants were charged with a variety of crimes, and in February 2004 a Tokyo district court sentenced Asahara to death. The Aum movement, however, astonishingly not only still exists but is reportedly thriving. In 2000 Aum renamed itself Aleph, and under a new leader, Fumhiro Joyu, its former spokesman, the group has attracted some fifteen hundred members.188 Aleph has sought to distance itself from Aum’s infamous past, portraying Asahara as its spiritual founder only, eschewing any theology that could be interpreted as justifying violence and murder, and making reparations payments to victims of the sarin attack.189 A letter from the Aleph executive posted on the group’s Web site in March 2005 evidenced this remorse:

It is 0 years since that tragic day. The world has gone through great changes which people could not have imagined and so has our group. However, whenever we think of the people who have lived with sorrow, our mind always go back to the day. Here, again, we express our deepest

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condolence on the people who died of the incident and give our greatest apology to what we did. As the best we can do, we will continue paying reparation from now. We will never repeat such a mistake.190

Conclusion

The emergence of obscure, idiosyncratic millenarian movements, zeal- ously nationalist religious groups, militantly antigovernment, far-right para- military organizations, and a transnational network of religious extremists that seeks the restoration of theocratic rule over what was once a vast pan- Islamic empire arguably represents a different and potentially far more lethal threat than traditional terrorist adversaries—certainly a far more amorphous and diffuse one. The members of the Aum sect in Japan, the fanatical Jewish groups in Israel, the Christian Patriots in America, some of the radical Islamic organizations active in Algeria, Lebanon, and Pales- tine, and what is often described as the al Qaeda “nebula” do not conform to our traditional stereotypes of the secular terrorist organization. These groups had a defined set of conventional—and thereby potentially attain- able—political, social, or economic objectives, and however disagreeable or distasteful their aims and motivations may have been, their ideology and intentions were at least comprehensible—albeit politically radical and per- sonally fanatical.

In terms of the countermeasures that the government, military, police, and intelligence and security services can employ against these new types of adversaries, the first and most immediate challenge is simply identify- ing them. These ethereal, amorphous entities will often lack the “footprint” or modus operandi of an actual, existing terrorist organization, making it more difficult for intelligence, law enforcement, and other security special- ists to get a firm idea or build a complete picture of their intentions and capabilities, much less their capacity for violence, before they strike. A sec- ond challenge is unraveling why mainstream religious traditions become radicalized and co-opted by violent extremists and why “fringe” movements or hitherto peaceful religious cults suddenly embark on lethal campaigns of indiscriminate terrorism. These primarily investigative, intelligence, and academic research issues need to be addressed before countervailing and deterrent measures can be considered. Traditional counterterrorism approaches and policies may not be relevant, much less effective, in the face of religious terrorism. Strategies that have been used successfully in the past—such as political concessions, financial rewards, amnesties, and other

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personal inducements—would be not only irrelevant but impractical, given both the religious terrorists’ fundamentally alienated worldviews and their often extreme, resolutely uncompromising demands. Above all, the pro- found sense of alienation and isolation of these cults and religious move- ments needs to be vigorously counteracted. A bridge needs to be found between mainstream society and these militants so that they do not feel threatened and forced to withdraw psychologically into aggressive defen- sive stances used to justify violence or physically into heavily armed, seeth- ing compounds or into preemptive acts of violence directed against what they regard as a menacing, predatory society.

Demonstrable progress arguably has been made along these lines within the United States. The nonviolent resolution of the eighty-one-day standoff between the Freemen, a Montana militia organization, and the FBI in April 996 provides a marked contrast to the debacle three years before involv- ing the assault on the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco, Texas. By skillfully employing the tactics of negotiation and the nonconfrontational approaches developed during previous encounters with antigovernment and white supremacist groups, the authorities defused a potentially explo- sive situation, obtained the surrender of sixteen heavily armed Freemen who had barricaded themselves in the isolated ranch they had dubbed “Jus- tus Township,” and avoided the bloodshed that had accompanied previous incidents.191

But while patient negotiation and minimum force have an important role to play in specific instances, particularly sieges, there is a more widespread problem of intense, often paranoiac, antigovernment sentiments in many pockets of the American hinterland. Here, the challenge is surely one of developing preemptive educational programs to mitigate grassroots alien- ation and polarization and to stop the spread of seditious and intolerant beliefs before they take hold and become exploited by demagogues and hatemongers. Across the United States, progress can also be seen in this respect. A number of community groups and political action committees are attempting to counter the spread of ignorance, hate, and simplistic con- spiracy theories that are used to explain complex economic phenomena and thus acquire new recruits to the antifederalist movement. Through a series of “town hall” meetings featuring plainspoken commonsense presen- tations that communicate important lessons in a vernacular as accessible and relevant to the local populace as that peddled by the conspiracy theo- rists, people gain a more critical perspective from which they can challenge the assertions of the sophists and refute the homespun ideologies that lie at the core of their odious belief systems.

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The immense challenge of countering religious and religion-inspired terrorism among homegrown groups in the United States is eclipsed, of course, by that of ameliorating anti-American sentiment abroad. The tre- mendous international outpouring of sympathy and support that followed the 9/ attacks has been vitiated to a great extent since by opposition to the United States–led invasion of Iraq and more general complaints over the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terrorism.192 The rev- elations about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” at the Guantánamo Bay U.S. military base193 have further sharpened friction between the United States and the Muslim world. Bin Laden’s astonishing popularity among the populations of such key American allies in the war on terrorism as Pakistan (where in 2004 he was viewed favorably by 65 percent of those polled), in Jordan (55 percent), and in Morocco (45 percent) attests to the intense antipathy felt toward the United States in North Africa, the Middle East, and South and South- East Asia, as well as in other regions with large Muslim populations. This perception of Islam under attack by an incontestably predatory, aggressive U.S.-dominated West is of course eagerly exploited and expertly manipu- lated by bin Laden and his minions. “This is the most dangerous, fiercest, and most savage crusade war launched against Islam,” bin Laden said in a statement broadcast by al-Jazeera on December 27, 200. “God willing the end of America is imminent.”194

The rise of bin Laden and his worldwide Islamic revolutionary move- ment, al Qaeda, is of course just such a case in point. The movement flows from a widespread perception of Islam under seige: threatened by an ineluc- tably bellicose Western-dominated world order and therefore portrays al Qaeda as the true defender of Islam and protector of Muslims everywhere. In this respect, the use of U.S. military force—even in self-defense or to prevent terrorist attacks—is seen not only by Muslims but by many others too as symptomatic of a heavy-handed foreign policy. This realization may account for the shift in U.S. foreign policy proposed in Washington, D.C., during the spring of 2005. The change would move away from the global war on terrorism declared by President Bush after 9/ to a more subtle approach and mix of policy options now dubbed a “strategy against violent extremism.” Although details remain sketchy, this reconfigured effort would specifically seek to ameliorate Muslim antipathy toward the United States by undercutting support for radical Islam.195

The above proposed policy adjustment notwithstanding, the resurgence of this ancient breed of adversary, the religious terrorist, actually means that nothing less than a sea change is required in our thinking about terrorism

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and the policies needed to counter it. Perhaps the most sobering realization in confronting religious terrorism is that the threat—and the problems that fuel it—can never be eradicated completely. The complexity, diversity, and often idiosyncratic characteristics of religious terrorism imply that there is no “magic bullet”—no single superior solution—that can be applied to all cases. Yet this fact only reinforces the need for multiple creative solutions, if not to resolve, then at least to ameliorate both the underlying causes of religious terrorism and its violent manifestations. Only by expanding our range of possible responses will we be able to target our resources prudently and productively in ways that will have the greatest positive effect.196

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