Author speaks on campus of book and terrorism
Eden Univer, Collegian Staff
Issue date: 10/16/07 Section: News
|
Stern's book was chosen as this semester's deans book as part of the Deans Book program at Commonwealth College, the honors college at UMass.
In her book, Stern studies and personally interviews terrorists in hopes of determining why they kill.
To begin her lecture, Stern answered a question she is frequently asked: why do terrorists speak with her? Stern outlined a few reasons why this might be, suggesting that they wanted to get a broader audience and hoped that she could provide that through her work, that they were seeking forgiveness, and they wanted to get across a message. She noted that in every case "they were trying to use me and I was very aware of that."
She also found that being a woman often made terrorists consider her "unthreatening and dumb" which she found to be "a great personal advantage." Stern holds a bachelors degree from Barnard College, a Masters degree from MIT, and a Doctorate degree from Harvard University.
Stern then explained many risk factors for a terrorist, dividing these factors into global, national, group and individual factors. She focused mainly on factors that affect people globally. Poverty, lack of education, lack of democracy and U.S. foreign policy were several that were examined.
Next, Stern turned to the importance of the internet in the spread of terrorism. She found that it allows for the kind of inspirational leaders who are involved with terrorism today to reach a greater audience. Also, according to Stern, the internet provides an outlet for "leaderless resistance" and "facilitates self-radicalism."
One thing that Stern specifically wanted to emphasize was the idea of humiliation and how that contributes to the creation of a terrorist, especially within youth.
Since writing her book, Stern explained that she studied Muslim youth groups in Germany and the United Kingdom. She found "the idea of Jihad is spreading like gangster rap," although Stern is quick to note that this does not imply that terrorism is not a very serious and dangerous subject.
She explained that within these youth groups it was considered a "cool idea to claim to be pro-Jihad and to know something about Jihad." To her dismay, this thought process was encountered even on elementary school playgrounds.
Stern finally turned her attention to the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. According to Stern, the main thing that the U.S. is doing wrong in this situation is ignoring the factors that enable terrorists to gather new recruits.
"We will not do well in this so-called war on terrorism," said Stern, "until we start thinking more about the flow of new recruits and a little less about the stock."
Stern explained that she was opposed to the Iraq war in the first place because she was concerned that it would be used to mobilize new recruits.
Eden Univer can be reached at euniver@student.umass.edu.
Be the first to comment on this story