Discussion 3
Religion and Terrorism
A. Core Characteristics of Religious Terrorism
Throughout history, many terrorist groups have evidenced a strong religious
component, mostly by dint of their membership. Anticolonial, nationalist movements
such as the Jewish terrorist organizations active in prein dependence Israel and the
Muslim- dominated FLN in Algeria come readily to mind, as do more recent examples
such as the overwhelmingly Catholic IRA; its Protestant counter parts, arrayed in various
loyalist paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the Ulster Volunteer
Force, and the Red Hand Commandos; and the predominantly Muslim PLO. In all these
groups, however, it is the political rather than the religious aspect of their motivation that
is dominant; the preeminence of their ethnonationalist or irredentist aims, or both, is
incontestable.
But for others such as al- Qaeda, however, the religious motive is overriding, and
indeed, the religious imperative for terrorism has become the most impor tant defining
characteristic of terrorist activity today. The consequences of the revolution that
transformed Iran into an Islamic republic in 1979 played a crucial role in the resurgence
of this strand of terrorism, but the modern advent of religious terrorism has not been
confined exclusively to Iran, much less to the Middle East or to Islam or indeed to al-
Qaeda: since the 1980s, 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
Jewish extremist who in 1995 assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, to the
police. “I acted alone and on orders from God.” Today, Amir’s words could just as easily
have come from the mouths of the ISIS fanatics whose violence in 2015 claimed the lives
of more than six thousand persons— Sunnis, Shi’a, Sufis, Druze, Kurds, Alawites, and
Yazidis, as well as Christians and Jews; the Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ)
terrorists responsible for the wave of suicide bombings of civilian buses and public
gathering places that convulsed Israel between 2000 and 2005; the young Dutch-
Moroccan Muslim who brutally murdered controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh in
NovemberE2004; the Japanese followers of Shoko Asahara in the Aum Shinrikyo sect
who perpetrated the MarchE1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in hopes of
hastening a new millennium; the militant Sikh movement that embarked on a bloody but
inchoate campaign of international terrorism during the 1980s; or the American Christian
white supremacist Patriot movement, which, acting on an even more complex and less
comprehensible mixture of seditious, millenarian, paranoiac, and antigovernment beliefs,
has waged a 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,” 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 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 24/7
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 chemical
warfare, poisoning wells and granaries used by the Romans and even sabotaging
Jerusalem’s water supply.
Similarly, the word “thug,” now used to describe “a vicious or brutal ruffian,” 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 members would forsake their daily occupations and lie in wait
for innocent travelers, 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 every year, a
murder rate rarely equaled by their modern- day counter parts armed with far more
efficient and destructively lethal weaponry.
Finally, the word “assassin”— “one who undertakes to put another to death by
treacherous violence”— was the name of a radical offshoot of the Muslim Shi’a Ismaili
sect, which between a.d. 1090 and 1272 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
supposedly undertook before embarking on their missions of murder. Violence for the
Assassins was a sacramental act, a divine duty, commanded by religious text and
communicated 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 impor tant 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.
It is interesting to note that as the number of religious terrorist groups was
increasing, the number of ethnonationalist/separatist terrorist groups declined
appreciably. One explanation for this trend may be that many ethnonationalist/separatist
groups, suddenly finding themselves at the end of the Cold War enmeshed in bitter
conflict and civil wars over their respective homelands—in Bosnia, Chechnya, Nagorno
Karabakh, and other parts of the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union,
for example— 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
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
counterproductive. Finally, it is also interesting to note that notwithstanding the end of
the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the number of
groups espousing MarxistLeninist- Maoist dogma (or some idiosyncratic interpretation of
those ideological elements) remained unchanged, thus further challenging the Cold War
myth of a global terrorist conspiracy directed by, and dependent upon, Moscow and its
communist minions.
It is perhaps not surprising 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 irrelevance of communist ideology, and the promise of
munificent benefits from the liberaldemocratic, capitalist state, once apparently
triumphant at what Francis Fukuyama termed the “end of history,” failed to materialize in
many countries throughout the world. The “public sense of insecurity” engendered by
these changes which has affected both the most economically disadvantaged and the most
prosperous— has been deepened by other societal factors, including accelerated
population growth, rapid urbanization, and the breakdown of local services(e.g., medical
care, housing, social welfare programs, and education), typically provided by the state.
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 organizations. Although
religious terrorists committed only 6E percent of recorded terrorist incidents between 1998
and 2004, their acts were responsible for 30E percent of the total number of fatalities
recorded during that time period. The direct relationship between the religious motive for
terrorism and higher numbers of deaths is even more dramatically depicted by the record
of violence perpetrated by Shi’a Islamic terrorists during the 1980s and by al- Qaeda
specifically between 1998 and 2004. Although Shi’a groups committed only 8E percent of
all international terrorist incidents between 1982 and 1989, they nonetheless were
responsible for 30E percent of the total number of fatalities arising from those incidents.
And while al- Qaeda perpetrated only 0.1E percent of all terrorist attacks between 1998
and 2004, it was responsible for nearly 19E percent of total fatalities from terrorist attacks
during that time period.
The reasons that terrorist incidents perpetrated for religious motives result in so
many more deaths may be found in the radically different value systems, 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 constraints
that may affect other terrorists. Whereas secular terrorists, even if they have the capacity
to do so, have rarely attempted indiscriminate killing on a truly massive scale because
such tactics are not consonant with their political aims and therefore are regarded as
counterproductive, if not immoral, religious terrorists often seek the elimination of
broadly defined categories of enemies and accordingly regard such large- scale violence
not only as morally justified but as necessary expedients for the attainment of their goals.
Religion— conveyed by sacred text and imparted via clerical authorities claiming to
speak for the divine— therefore critically serves as a means to explain con temporary
events and, in turn, as a legitimating force justifying violence. This explains why clerical
sanction is so impor tant to religious 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 perceptions 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
contemplate 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 terrorists’ religion or religious sect. This
explains the rhetoric common to “holy terror” manifestos describing those outside of the
terrorists’ religious community 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.
B. 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 ISIS and their respective affiliates,
franchises, and branches in par tic u lar. The revolution that transformed Iran into an
Islamic republic in 1979 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 Iranian new year in MarchE1980.
The Islamic revolution in Iran has been held up as an example to Muslims
throughout the world, exhorting them to reassert the fundamental teachings of the Qur’an
and to resist the intrusion of Western— particularly U.S.— 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, persecuted
because of its special, revealed knowledge, but it further entails an unswerving conviction
of the inherent illegitimacy of all secular government. Under this rationale, legitimacy
can be conferred only through the adoption of Islamic law. Accordingly, since Iran was
the only state to have begun the pro cess 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 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 Grand Ayatollah Baqer al- Sadr, a leading Iraqi Shi’a
cleric. “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, the Islamic Republic’s first defense minister who would subsequently die a
martyr during the 1980–1988 Iran- Iraq War, once explained: “We are not fighting within
the rules of the world as it exists today. We reject all those rules.” Similarly, Hussein
Mussawi, the former leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah (“Party of God”) who was the victim
of an Israeli helicopter- borne assassination in 1992, maintained: “We are not fighting so
that the enemy recognizes us and offers us something. We are fighting to wipe out the
enemy.”
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)
issued in 1989 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 1993 specifically obtained a fatwa from Sheikh
Omar Abdel- Rahman (the blind Egyptian cleric who died in 2017 while 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 selfmartyrdom— though suicide is
forbidden by Islamic law. For example, immediately after the 1983 suicide attacks on the
U.S. Marines and French 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 protection of
the All Powerful one and of the angels.”
Nor are such sentiments restricted to radical Shi’a only. Militant Sunni
fundamentalist organizations portray their struggle in similarly uncompromising terms.
According to Antar Zouabri, a leader of the GIA’s struggle in the 1990s to establish an
Islamic republic in Algeria who was killed by security forces in 2002, there could never
be either dialogue or truce in his organization’s struggle against the illegitimate, secular
Algerian government. The word of God, he argued, is immutable on this point. God,
Zouabri explained to an interviewer in 1996, 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.”
Bin Laden 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 submerged the ability of a single
man to affect the course of history, bin Laden effectively melded the strands of religious
fervor, Muslim piety, and a profound sense of grievance into a power full ideological
force. “All men dream: but not equally,” T. E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of
Arabia, 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 on their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
During the late 1990s, bin Laden set the stage for this clash as the author/
architect of two major fatwas. It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam
had suffered from aggression, inequity and injustice imposed on them by the
ZionistCrusaders 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.
The second fatwa, styled as a “Statement of the World Islamic Front: Jihad
Against Jews and Crusaders,” was issued on FebruaryE23, 1998. Although the basic
message was the same, it differed from the 1996 iteration in that bin Laden was now only
one of five signatories. The others were Ayman al- Zawahiri, the emir of the Jihad Group
in Egypt who would later succeed bin Laden as al- Qaeda’s leader following the latter’s
killing in 2011; Abu Yasir Rifa’I Ahmad Taha, head 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.
The United States was seen by both bin Laden and al- Zawahiri as willfully
impeding this goal. They described 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 it gives to the so- called near enemy— the corrupt, reprobate, and authoritarian anti-
Islamic regimes in the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia that
could not otherwise remain in power. In recent years, however, ISIS, an especially
extreme and brutal terrorist movement that was once affiliated with al- Qaeda, has been
at the forefront of this ongoing struggle. Like al- Qaeda, ISIS also seeks to restore the
caliphate and thereby ensure that a rigidly fundamentalist interpretation of Islam becomes
the only accepted religion and sharia, the legal system based on Islamic religious precepts
drawn from the Qur’an and Hadith, the only law. In JuneE2014, ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr
al- Baghdadi (real name: Ibrahim Awad al- Badri), dramatically upstaged al- Qaeda when
he formally declared himself the caliph of a newly proclaimed caliphate— henceforth to
be called the Islamic State.
With this bold move, al- Baghdadi aimed to achieve what bin Laden had only
promised: nothing less than redrawing the map of the Middle East, erasing the artificial
states and contrived borders created by the Western powers following World War I, while
resurrecting the Muslim empire that once stretched from Spain across North Africa,
through the Middle East and the Caucasus, into South and Southeast Asia. A
distinguishing feature of al- Baghdadi’s Islamic State has been its uncompromising
enmity toward a variety of Islam’s minority sects, including Sufis, Druze, Kurds,
Alawites, and Yazidis, alongside an unremitting hostility to the Shi’a, the West, and to
Christians, Jews, and other nonbelievers.
It should be noted, however, that the differences between ISIS and alQaeda have
thus far been more in style and tone than in substance and ideology. Both movements’
overarching worldviews are firmly rooted in the principles of re sis tance to Western
influence and encroachment and the unstinting defense of Muslim lands most forcefully
expounded three de cades ago by the leading jihadi theorist and propagandist of his time,
Abdullah Azzam. Born near Jenin, Palestine, in 1941, Azzam studied Islamic law as an
undergraduate in Syria before obtaining his doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence at Cairo’s
al- Azhar University, one of the world’s most famous and renowned Islamic institutions
of higher education. While in Cairo, Azzam befriended the family of the prominent
Egyptian Islamist martyr, Sayyid Qutb, and fervently embraced both Qutb’s strident
defense of Islam and profound antipathy to the West and Western cultural values as
articulated in the latter’s seminal work, Milestones.
Indeed, Azzam’s influence over the Salafi- Jihadi movement continues to this day
despite his assassination in 1989. Azzam’s fundamental thesis that an aggressive,
predatory war is being waged against Islam by its enemies, including the Western
democratic liberal state; corrupt, repressive Westernbacked local apostates; the Shi’a;
and, other Muslim minorities— has become a staple of the inevitablility of the epic
confrontations variously described by bin Laden, al- Zawahiri, and al- Baghdadi, among
others. The need for global jihad to defeat these enemies is thus as integral an aspect of
ISIS’s mind- set as it is of al- Qaeda’s. Like al- Qaeda, ISIS also rails against the West’s
exploitation and expropriation of the Muslims’ most precious natural resources— its oil
and natural gas fields— and the established order’s creation and support of corrupt,
compliant local regimes that facilitate the ongoing plundering of the Muslim world. At
the height of its popularity and power, in late 2015/early 2016 ISIS reportedly could
claim the allegiance of fifty affiliates in some twenty- one different countries and thirty-
three actual “official provinces” (wilayets) in eleven of those countries.
C. Jewish Extremism
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 Jewish terrorist movements that have surfaced in Israel since
the early 1980s. To a great extent, many of the members of these groups draw their
inspiration from the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. 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, which evoked images of Frantz
Fanon’s philosophy of the catharsis of violence.
When Kahane and his family emigrated to Israel in 1971, 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 1980, 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 Occupied Territories.” For more than a de cade 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 as well as the
ancient biblical lands of Judea and Samaria (e.g., the occupied West Bank of the Jordan
River)—or for their physical annihilation if they refused to leave. In a speech before
university students in a Los Angeles suburb in 1988, Kahane described the Arabs as
“dogs,” as people who “multiply like fleas” who must be expelled from Israel or
eliminated.
When a Jewish yeshiva (religious school) student was murdered by Arabs two
years later, a group of Kahane’s followers in the ultranationalist 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 Israelioccupied West Bank at a time of day
calculated to inflict the maximum casualties. Significantly, like their Islamic counter
parts, the Jewish 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 Muslim
students as they emerged from their classrooms for the noontime recess, killing three and
wounding 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 passengers 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, its members were arrested. Only then did information come
to light that for the preceding four years they had also been plotting 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 Jewish religion, the Second Temple, which
was destroyed in a.d. 70.
The same volatile combination— messianic visions of redemption, legitimated by
clerical dispensation and achieved through direct action entailing indiscriminate mass
murder— was also evident a de cade later in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre
and the assassination of Rabin the following year. The first incident occurred on
FebruaryE25, 1994, at a holy site revered and shared by both Jews and Muslims. Dr.E
Baruch Goldstein, an American- born, ultranationalist, orthodox Jew and ardent disciple
of Kahane, entered the Ibrahim Mosque, located at the Cave, and opened fire on Muslim
worshipers who had gathered there for Friday prayers. 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 119 bullets from his M-16 assault rifle into the
crowd, killing 29 and wounding 150 before he was set upon by the stunned congregants,
who beat him to death. Goldstein’s grave has become a shrine, guarded and revered by
the ultrareligious nationalists who share his intense animus toward secular Israeli
government 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 1995 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 opponents. Like Goldstein, Amir believed that
he was fulfilling God’s will. Invoking 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 maintained, “he must
be killed.” 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 bombings to avenge Palestinian attacks as well
as the murder of Palestinian terrorists released from Israeli jails as part of the peace pro
cess.
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 AprilE1997 for Jews to emulate Hamas and launch suicide attacks of their own
against Arabs. “Suicide during war time 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.”
D. Sikh Militants
The radical Sikh movement as it crystallized in the early 1980s also conforms to
the pattern and the characteristics of terrorism motivated by religion discussed in this
chapter. Unlike previous campaigns for Sikh autonomy, the activists behind this new,
more aggressive militancy were also far more religious than their mostly secular
predecessors. This shift in emphasis thus elevated the irredentist struggle for self-
determination in the Punjab, the Sikh’s traditional homeland straddling present- day India
and Pakistan, to the imperative of creating a separate, ethnically, culturally, and
religiously homogeneous Sikh nation called Khalistan, the “Land of the Pure.” A
charismatic rural preacher named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a disciple of the
eighteenth- century hallowed Sikh martyr, Baba Deep Singh, had emerged as the modern
movement’s leader.
Although the Sikh religion expresses nonviolence and condemns the taking of
human life, Bhindranwale argued that violence was both justifiable and necessary given
these dire circumstances to break the domination imposed over the Sikhs by India’s
Hindu majority. Bhindranwale was also strident in his condemnation of those whom he
described as “the enemies of religion”— that is, moderate Sikhs who did not share the
revitalized movement’s hard- line position and who were therefore decried as heretics
and traitors to the Sikh people.
Thereafter, a bloody campaign commenced to cleanse the Punjab of all “foreign
influences.” Bands of young Sikhs started locally, indiscriminately killing Hindus, but it
was not long before the violence escalated to include the hijacking in 1981 of an Air
India passenger aircraft to Pakistan. Two years of unrelenting terrorism in the Punjab
followed, prompting commentators to term 1983 “The Year of the Armageddon.” By the
spring of 1984, India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, had enough. On JuneE5, 1984, she
ordered Indian military forces to assault the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikh
religion’s holiest shrine, which Bhindranwale had turned into his headquarters. Code-
named “Operation Bluestar,” the attack by some ten thousand infantry, paratroops, and
police backed by armor and artillery, was neither swiftly nor efficiently executed. It took
two days of brutal fighting to clear the compound of Sikh fighters. Bhindranwale was
among the first to die and thereafter attained the venerated status as a fallen martyr to the
Sikh cause.
Until the SeptemberE11, 2001, attacks, this mostly forgotten incident held the
nefarious distinction as the most deadly act of international terrorism in history. Less than
an hour before the blast that destroyed flight number 185 over international waters off the
coast of Ireland, another bomb had exploded— — but this time prematurely, as baggage
was being transferred at Tokyo’s Narita Airport from a Canadian Pacific flight that had
just arrived from Vancouver to a waiting Air India plane. Two airport workers were
killed and four others wounded in the blast. Both incidents were blamed on a radical Sikh
separatist group called Babbar Khalsa (“Tigers of the True Faith”).
An estimated twenty thousand persons were killed in the Punjab as a result of the
violent campaign that continued into the 1990s. Bombs concealed in transistor radios
were routinely placed in crowded urban locations and marketplaces, and on buses.
Although the majority of victims were Hindus, Sikhs suffered as well. The attacks, one
con temporary observer noted, were almost always “entirely indiscriminate in nature,”
with crowded passenger trains a favorite target. One hundred Hindu passengers, for
instance, were killed and seventy injured in two such incidents in 1991 before the
violence was Finally suppressed two years later.
E. American Christian White Supremacists
Half a world away from the Middle East and South Asia, in the very heartland of
the United States, 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 AlfredEP. Murrah Federal Office Building in
Oklahoma City in AprilE1995 suddenly shed unaccustomed light on an indigenous,
violent, Christian white supremacist and antifederalist movement that had been active
long before this tragedy.
In JuneE 1997, a Denver federal court convicted Timothy McVeigh, a twenty-
eight- year- old U.S. Army veteran, of perpetrating the attack. Sentenced to death by
lethal injection, McVeigh was executed four years later. An antigovernment, right- wing
extremist, McVeigh engineered the attack with the help of three friends, TerryEL. Nichols
and Michael and Lori Fortier, to commemorate the second anniversary of the FBI’s
bloody assault on the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco, Texas, during which
seventy four people, including twenty- one children, were killed.
He and his alleged accomplices were apparently obsessed by the idea that the
Waco assault— and a similar FBI siege of a reputed white supremacists’ rural cabin at
Ruby Ridge, Idaho, the previous year 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 resistance which, it transpired, were
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 Second 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 “con vey or belt,” to use a phrase
coined by Leonard Zeskind, the director of the Kansas City– based Institute for Research
and Education of Human Rights, an organization dedicated to social and economic
justice. The metaphor is intended to depict a pro cess whereby individuals 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 preoccupied with far-
fetched conspiracy theories have existed in the United States for de cades, the advent of
extremist white supremacist “citizens’ militias” and related Christian Patriot paramilitary
groups oriented toward survivalism, outdoor skills, guerrilla training, and outright
sedition is a relatively more recent development. Thus, while the various militia
movements have surfaced only within the past twenty- five 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 power full way of attracting people— like McVeigh— who were not only
vehemently opposed to gun control 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 fundamental
individual liberties.
The Michigan Militia, a paramilitary survivalist organization which at one time
claimed to have twelve thousand members and to which McVeigh and Nichols were
believed to have been connected, maintained that the U.S. government had initiated a
program to intervene in the affairs of every American. “The Government is [already] in
control,” Ray Southwell, the group’s cofounder and information officer explained in a
1994 interview. “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.”
At one time, an estimated eight hundred other similarly oriented militias— with a
total membership claimed to be more than five million, though more realistically put at
no more than one hundred thousand— had reportedly organized in almost every state of
the Union. By 2007, however, there were fewer than fifty such groups. But a combination
of both the subsequent economic recession and President Barack Obama’s election the
following year triggered renewed growth with a sixfold expansion in the number of
militia groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 276 existing groups in its
annual survey of militia activity in the United States for 2015— a 37E percent increase
over the previous year’s figure.
The difficulty in gauging even the rough dimensions of the American militia
movement is a product not only of its geographical 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 adherents
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 politics 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.EStrangelove. The
“marching” militias (also referred to as “up- front” militias), on the other hand, are
actively involved in violent, seditious activities, embracing the combination of
revolutionary, racist, and anti- Semitic doctrines inherent in the wider American Christian
Patriot movement. It is this more radical element of the militia phenomenon who
fervently believed in an impending UN invasion and takeover of the United States and
therefore had resolved to take violent action to prevent it from occurring. At the height of
this movement’s popularity in the 1990s, it numbered no more than a dedicated hard core
of perhaps ten thousand members.
To the south, the Texas- based Big Star One claimed a de cade 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 Republic of Texas, prosecuted what it described as a “campaign of
paper terrorism”— attempting to throttle state courts with bogus land claims and bad
checks— claiming that the United States illegally annexed Texas in 1845 and therefore
has no jurisdiction over the state. The group was involved in a weeklong siege with law
enforcement authorities that was resolved peacefully despite threats by the militia to
“wage an Alamo- style fight to the death.”
In 1995 and again in 2011, American law enforcement agencies uncovered three
separate plots involving persons who had connections to various American Christian
white supremacist organizations who had sought to obtain deadly toxins and
contaminants for use in terrorist attacks. In MarchE1995, two members of the Minnesota
Patriots Council, a militia group, were convicted of stockpiling enough ricin to kill at
least 129 people, allegedly as part of a plan to murder IRS agents, U.S. marshals,
and local deputy sheriffs. According 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 Mary land
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 assault rifles,
smoke grenades, blasting caps— and white supremacist literature.
And in DecemberE1995, 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 130 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. WhenE 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. The most recent plot involved four members of a
Georgia militia who conspired to use ricin to kill government employees in an attack
allegedly planned for Washington, D.C. They had also developed a backup plan to use
explosives to destroy a federal office building just “like Timothy McVeigh,” the
ringleader of the cell boasted.
The perpetrators and plotters of these acts consider themselves “minutemen”:
ordinary citizens and patriots ready to take up arms at a moment’s notice to defend their
inalienable 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 220Eyears 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.”
Although the militias are the latest iteration to this distinctly American radicalist
phenomenon, their pedigree can be traced directly to the Posse Comitatus (Latin for
“power of the county”) movement founded during the 1970s and its 1980s offshoot—
with which McVeigh is also believed to have had ties— the Arizona Patriots. These
groups strenuously reject any form of government above the county level and specifically
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 four de cades, local
chapters of the Posse Comitatus have been founded in almost every state in the United
States. The group became increasingly violent, particularly in the American Midwest and
the far Northwest during the 1980s, with members attacking local, state, and federal law
enforcement officers who were attempting to serve subpoenas or other wise enforce the
law. An attempt to serve a subpoena on North Dakota Posse Comitatus member Gordon
Kahl in 1983 resulted in the first of many armed confrontations between the authorities
and the radical right. In the ensuing shoot- out, Kahl killed two federal marshals before
he himself was shot to death. Undeterred by Kahl’s death, in DecemberE1986 six
members of the Arizona Patriots were arrested and subsequently convicted on charges of
plotting to bomb an IRS office in Ogden, Utah; the Los Angeles Federal Building
(specifically, the FBI offices located there); and a synagogue in Phoenix, Arizona. A
second generation of Arizona Patriots attempted to carry on their predecessors’
campaign. Nightly shortwave radio broadcasts by Patriot leader William Cooper exhorted
members to forcibly resist the imposition of the “new world order” epitomized by
institutions such as the United Nations and treaties such as the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade, but he attracted a meager following and the group eventually folded.
Identity theology, combined with militant tax re sis tance and a form of regressive
populism, figures prominently in the Christian Patriotism doctrine subscribed to by the
“marching” militia groups today. The ideological heir to the Posse Comitatus with its
hard- line antifederalist principles, Christian Patriotism goes one step further by
embracing a salient theological 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 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 AngloSaxon Christians 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 synthesis 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
“fraudulent” 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.
At the nexus of Identity, Christian Patriotism, and the militia movements was
once the organization called the Aryan Nations. An extremist, anti-Semitic, neo- Nazi
group of white supremacists, survivalists, and militant tax resisters, the Aryan Nations
had its headquarters 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 1974 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 performed a function
similar to that of the PLO, acting as an umbrella group for like- minded organizations,
providing a coordinating and liaison function. To this end, Aryan Nations congresses
were held almost every year between 1973 and the 1990s— except for 1985, 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 1990 event.
The Aryan Nations, however, collapsed more than a de cade ago as a result of the
dual blows of Butler’s death in 2004 and a lawsuit filed 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.
This “cleansing” of the United States forms an immutable point of reference for
the Christian Patriots’ ideology as well. Robert Matthews, the deceased leader of the
Order, once declared that to stem this tide, all Jews, blacks, Hispanics, and other “mud
people,” along with white “race traitors,” must be exterminated in what he described as
“a racial and religious Armageddon.” 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 have often been
clergymen— such as the Michigan Militia’s founder and “general,” Pastor Norman
Olson; the Idaho- based Aryan Nations’ leader, Reverend Richard Girnt Butler; and the
Ku Klux Klan’s Pastor Thomas Robb— who deliberately flaunted their clerical titles to
endow their organizations with a theological veneer that condones and justifies violence.
The Christian Patriots do not appear to recognize any of the political, 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 Sunni and Shi’a extremists or the messianic Jewish fanatics
in the Middle East or Sikh militants in South Asia. All of these groups transform abstract
political ideologies and objectives into a religious imperative. Violence 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.
Indeed, in the 1980s, evidence came to light that at least some of the movement’s
key figures had laid plans to engage in mass, indiscriminate killing. For example, an
indictment handed down by a U.S. federal grand jury in 1987 alleged that fifteen
representatives of groups from throughout the United States and Canada had met at the
Aryan Nations headquarters in Idaho in 1983 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 assassinations of federal officials,
politicians and Jews, as well as bombings and polluting of municipal water supplies
[emphasis added].” Any doubts of their seriousness of purpose were dispelled when
police and federal agents raided a white supremacist compound in rural Arkansas in
AprilE1984 and discovered a stockpile of some thirty gallons of cyanide to be used to
poison reservoirs in Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.
The influence that apocalyptic revelations and millenarian imperatives exerted
over many of these groups may be seen in the “DIY [do- it- yourself] apocalypse kit”
once 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-15 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 were the other recommended essentials— with
MOM having offered for sale such additional optional gear as a military surplus NBC
(nuclear, biological, and chemical) protective suit (available in green only) for fifty
dollars.
These beliefs involving the inevitability of Armageddon are actively encouraged
by proselytizers of Dominion theology, a reinterpretation of Christian Identity doctrine
popular within some Christian Patriot circles. 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 apocalypse, 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.
A subsequent 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— a movement that the Washington Post characterized as “an anti-
Semitic, anti- multiculturalism affiliation that opposes biracial relationships, same- sex
marriage, taxation and abortion.” 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 whom he discovered having sex with her Israelite (Jewish) lover. The biblical
tale is taken by some modern- day Christian antiabortion 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.” 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, homo sexuality, and abortion,
and an end to the federal banking system. They are reported to be highly secretive: a
loose association of like- minded individuals adhering to the wider movement’s
“leaderless re sis tance” or “phantom cells” strategy.
A clear convergence of religious terrorism and violence against homosexuals and
abortion clinics and their staffs has also been evident on several occasions over the past
few de cades. In 1994, for example, a Christian fundamentalist minister named Paul Hill
shot to death a clinic doctor and his bodyguard in Pensacola, Florida. In his book Should
We Defend Born and Unborn Children with Force?, Hill cited Phineas’s biblical mission
and writes of the need for a vigilante underground to punish all who “disobey God’s law”
on abortion or homo sexuality and engage in other forms of blasphemous behavior.
The uncompromising antigovernment fervor, aggressive racism, and strident anti-
Semitism espoused by the American Christian Patriot movement have not been confined
to the United States. The racist British group Combat 18 (which takes its name from the
first and eighth letters of the alphabet— Adolf Hitler’s initials), for example, modeled
itself on the American militias and Christian Patriot movements, advocating attacks on
the police and other symbols of governmental authority. And perhaps the most significant
atrocity committed by a white supremacist since the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal
office building in Oklahoma City was the JulyE2011 bombing and shooting rampage that
took place in Oslo and Utøya, Norway, by a then thirty- two- year- old Norwegian named
Anders Behring Breivik.
The fact that the American Christian Patriot movement, according to one analyst,
“is now larger than at any time in the 1990s”— with 1,360 identifiable groups active as
recently as 2012 compared with 858 in 1996— attests to the remarkable resiliency and
durability of this twisted mélange of extremist views and conspiratorial theorizing. In this
respect, the growth of the so- called Sovereign Citizen Movement (SCM) is perhaps the
latest iteration of this ideological continuum. The FBI describes the movement’s
adherents, known as “Sovereign Citizens,” as “anti- government extremists who believe
that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’
from the United States. As a result, they believe that they don’t have to answer to any
government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments or law
enforcement.”
The difficulty in gauging the threat from the SCM is a reflection of its amorphous
membership, deliberately unorganized nature, local leadership, and ambiguous, broadly
inclusive ideology. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, hypothesized that a
reasonable estimate of sovereign believers in 2011 was in the range of 100,000 dedicated
adherents, with perhaps another 200,000 persons at various stages of personal
commitment. Although the movement has long styled itself as an exclusionist white,
Anglo- Saxon, Christian entity with strong racist and anti- Semitic beliefs, there are
nonetheless many African American, Asian, and other persons of different races and
religions who identify themselves as Sovereign Citizens. According to David Brannan, a
former police officer and expert on American religious and political extremism, “Some of
the biggest developments on the Right have been in the Sovereign Citizen’s Movement
moving AWAY from a specific Christian Identity focus/context.” Indeed, the SCM’s
growing prominence and popularity is part of a broader make over that has fundamentally
transformed the violent American Far Right during the first two de cades of the twenty-
first century. “The neo- Nazi types of the late 1980s to 2000,” Brannan points out, “are
being replaced by Nationalists concerned with immigration— and they are wearing suits
and square rimmed glasses rather than combat boots and red suspenders.”
F. Cults
The special potential of terrorism motivated by a religious imperative to cause
mass indiscriminate killing has been perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the ominous
activities of various religious cults and sects in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere
since the 1980s. While the attention of law enforcement officials, government
intelligence agencies, and security services was focused firmly on the more visible threat
presented by familiar terrorist adversaries in the traditional ideological,
ethnonationalist/separatist and more mainstream religiously inspired groups, members of
these other, often uniquely idiosyncratic movements were already poised to cross the
threshold of terrorist use of either weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or mass
annihilation.
In 1984, for example, a nonlethal but disturbingly portentous incident occurred in
the small Oregon town of The 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 their
plot to gain power in this way failed, 751 people did become ill, 45 of whom 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. The Rajneeshis’ successful cultivation and effective dispersal of the
bacteria clearly suggested the ease with which lethal agents could potentially be produced
and disseminated in even larger population centers.
The release of deadly nerve gas on the Tokyo underground in MarchE1995 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 television 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 dynamiters 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) arguably still represents a new
kind of terrorist threat, posed not by traditional secular adversaries but by a mass
religious movement motivated by a mystical, almost transcendental, divinely inspired
imperative. The group was founded in 1987 by Shoko Asahara. A partially blind, hitherto
unexceptional purveyor of supposedly medicinal herbs, who in 1982 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
inclinations 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.” Asahara believed that he had been
ordained an Abiraketsu no mikoto, an ancient “light god,” and given the divine task of
establishing the “Kingdom of Shambhala”— a utopian community populated only by
those who had achieved psychic powers.
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.
From the start, Asahara preached about the inevitability of an impending
apocalypse, stressing his unique messianic mission and variously describing himself as “
Today’s Christ,” “the saviour of This Century,” and “the one and only person who had
acquired supreme truth.” By 1994, 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 century Chinese religious leader who created the Ming dynasty.
Particular 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 prophesied cataclysmic events, Asahara also
borrowed Judeo- Christian notions ofE Armageddon and frequently cited the apocalyptic
predictions of the sixteenth- century French astrologer Nostradamus, whose recently
translated works had become best- sellers in Japan. According to Asahara, the world
would end— but he was never sure exactly when, variously fixing 1993, 1997, 1999,
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 1987 that
nuclear war was “sure to break out” between 1999 and 2003.
Amazingly, this was neither the first nor the last Aum attack to employ chemical
or biological warfare agents. In AprilE 1990, 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 targeted downtown Tokyo, and specifically, the Diet
(parliament) building. The toxin, however, proved in effective. 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 JuneE 1994, 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 symptoms. Although they became 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 other persons 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. 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 World War II to murder tens of thousands of people—on MayE5, 1995, 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 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 to become the prime
minister of Japan one day.
On DecemberE15, 1995, the Japanese prime minister, invoking a 1952 ant
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 such
as Aum, new legislation— the “Regulation Against the Group Which Conducted
Indiscriminate Massive Murder Attack” (Dantai Kisei Ho)— was enacted in 1999 that
provided the authorities with additional, strengthened powers to monitor and curtail the
activities of groups like Aum. Asahara and his lieutenants were charged with a variety of
crimes, and in FebruaryE2004 a Tokyo district court sentenced Asahara to death. The
Aum movement, however, still exists. In 2000, Aum renamed itself Aleph, and under a
new leader, Fumhiro Joyu, its former spokesman, the group attracted some fifteen
hundred members.
