HOMEGROWN TERRORISTS

Peter Bergen, United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists (New York: Crown, 2016) ("Assertions that Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with Islam are as nonsensical as claims that the Crusades had nothing to do with Christian belies about the sanctity of Jerusalem, or that the exponential growth of Israel settlements on Palestinian lands is not rooted in the beliefs of certain Jewish fundamentalists about the God-given rights of Jews olive in their God-given homeland." "Of course, only a tiny minority of Muslims are willing to do violence in the name of Allah, and Muslims as a group are certainly no more violent than the adherents of any other religion. Christians, for example, have invoked Christ's name to justify any number of crusades, pogroms, wars, and imperial adventures. Nor is this to make the claim that religion itself causes violence, but rather that ideologies of any form, including those that are avowedly secular, that claim to have discovered 'the truth' often end up leaving a great trail of dead bodies I'm their wake. The monstrous political religions of Nazism and Stalinism, in their relatives brief tenancies, created more human misery than any of the creeds hat preceded them." Id. at 28. "Americans often suffer from historical amnesia. [T]he golden age of terrorism in the States was in the 1970s, not in post-9/11 America. During the '70s the Weather Underground targeted the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and banks and was responsible for some 45 bombings. Other antiwar activists carried out major bombings at Fresno State College, the University of Wisconsin and City Hall in Portland. The Black Panthers, who were active for only three years during the 1970s, mounted 24 bombing, assaults, and hijackings, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberation Nacional Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican separatists group, mounted 82 bombings, mostly in New York and Chicago, There we an astonishing 112 hijackings in the States during the 1970s, and terrorist l=killed 184 people and injured more than 600 others.In the decade and a half since 9/11, jihadists and far-right terrorists have, by contrast, killed 93." Id. at 271.).