Catalogue of Terror

[Valin]

City Jounal:

The Encyclopedia of Militant Islam is more than a reference book.

Herbert W. Stupp

September 30, 2016

 

The Encyclopedia of Militant Islam by Bryan Griffin with Herb London and Jed Babbin (London Center for Policy Research, 319 pp., $16.95)

 

Rare is the book that qualifies as a serious reference work and a riveting “read” at the same time. Yet Bryan Griffin’s Encyclopedia of Militant Islam satisfies on both counts. The nations with the highest rates of terrorist attacks are majority Muslim, he informs us. Hence, ordinary, non-violent Muslims are the primary victims of Islamic terror.

 

The Encyclopedia presents detailed information on 44 different militant Islamic groups. Some, like Hamas and ISIS, are in the news in western nations. Others, like Jemaah Islamiyah (which has active terrorists in the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia) are virtually unknown in the West. Among the less well-known groups is the Caucasus Emirate, which operates mostly within former Soviet satellites and in Russia, bombing sites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 2009, the group assassinated an Orthodox Russian priest. The Caucasus Emirate also incubated the Tsarnaev brothers, notorious here for 2013’s deadly Boston Marathon bombing. At this writing, one can reasonably wonder if the recent Istanbul airport bombings were directed by the Caucasus Emirate or an affiliated group.

 

(Snip)

 

Griffin, an associate fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, offers strategies for fighting and defeating groups like ISIS. We have to “recover confidence in our culture and its values,” he writes. “We have to both regain the courage to label oppression and extremism for what it is, and condemn it. . . .If we speak the obvious truths about the failure of the nations that ascribe to hard-line Sharia to protect their peoples against that violence and oppression, they—like the Soviets before them—can have no answer.” Good advice for the current and soon-to-be-elected U.S. presidential administration.