"Tragically timely" is the only way to describe Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism. Hoffman has been working at this subject for 20 years, first at the RAND Corporation in California, then for the last several years as director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. Hoffman finished the book in January 1998. During the weeks before the book's official publication date of September 17, the daily press became a series of case studies on the themes of Hoffman's lifework:

• August 7: Bombs explode at two United States embassies in Africa, killing 10 at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and 253 at Nairobi in Kenya, with thousands more injured.
• August 15: A car bomb detonates in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, killing 28 civilians, the majority of whom are women and children, including several from the Irish Republic.
• August 20: U.S. Cruise missiles take out the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, and slam into suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan as reprisals against the organization of Osama bin Laden, a multimillionaire exiled from Saudi Arabia and suspected of masterminding the African attacks.
• September 3: President Clinton visits Omagh on his way back to the United States from a summit in Moscow and solemnly offers his thanks to the survivors of the blast for "restating your determination to walk the road of peace." On the same day Louis Freeh, Director of the fbi, tells the Senate Judiciary Committee that while the number of terrorist incidents around the world is declining, the casualties from such attacks are rising dramatically.
• The first week of September: The Irish and British parliaments both race to pass legislation aimed at "the Real ira" and other paramilitary splinter groups resisting the peace accord signed last Easter week by the main political factions in Northern Ireland.

If ever there was a time for a book providing informed perspective on the origins, development, goals, characteristics, stratagems, and mentalites of international terrorism, now is that time.

Inside Terrorism should not, however, be confused with what can be found in a weekly newsmagazine. Osama bin Laden and the Real IRA, for example, do not show up in its pages. Nor does it offer the detailed treatment of current incidents and terrorist groups found in official government publications.1 But what the book does treat it treats very well.

Hoffman plunges into the complexities of his topic with a nuanced history of the word itself. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was the first modern use of the term, but as employed in France in the 1790s, terror was a means for the new regime to establish order. During the next century and more, terror was a self-conscious tool put to use by Russian constitutionalists challenging the rule of the Tsars, anarchists from several European nations lashing out at governmental oppression, militant Armenians struggling for independence from Turkey, and (with horrifying consequences in World War I) Serbian nationalists fighting the Austro-Hungarian empire. These groups used terror as outsiders wanting to bring down the system.

In the 1930s, terror took on another meaning in Germany, Italy, and Russia as Fascists and Stalinists sought to intimidate their own citizens. Western democracies quite rightly protested, although some of them (like the United States) had not too many years before countenanced analogous acts for analogous purposes of intimidation against enslaved and indigenous populations.

After World War II, terrorism swung back to a strategy of the "outs" versus the "ins." Two clusters of events from the war years were particularly significant for inspiring the ethno-nationalist aspirations that have been so important over the last half-century. First, when the British were defeated at Singapore in February 1942 and the Americans surrendered at Corregidor in May 1942, the myth of Western invincibility was shattered. Second, the Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941, turned out to have ironic effects. The charter's lofty statements defending principles of local self-determination imposed conditions on the West that, for the most part, Western nations did not intend to fulfill. In turn, that failure fueled an explosion of ethnic, nationalist, and religious anger at Western states, businesses, and institutions.

Hoffman's consideration of terrorism over the last decades leads him to a careful definition: "the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change." A chapter on public opinion lets him show how the modern media—especially the competitive necessity for highlighting drama and blood—have become ideal vehicles for promoting terrorist political goals. His account of the PLO, however, adds an ironic twist. Once the world's main educator of terrorists, as well as itself a major perpetrator of terrorism, the PLO has been changed by financial success, which has given it a stake in the system that moderates at least some of its violence.

In many ways, the heart of the book is Hoffman's full-scale picture of religiously inspired terrorism. The increasing proportion of terrorist groups inspired wholly or primarily by religion is sober in the extreme—including the Japanese followers of Shoko Asahara in the Aum Shinrikyo sect (poison gas in Tokyo subways, March 1995), American Christian Patriots (implicated in the Oklahoma City murders by Timothy McVeigh), Jewish followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane (Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29 worshiping Muslims on February 25, 1994; Yigal Amir's assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995), and militants in both Shi'a and Sunni branches of Islam (the World Trade Center blast of 1993, Hamas suicide bombings in Israel that killed 60 in February and March 1996, massacres of tourists in Egypt in April 1996 and November 1997, and the deaths of perhaps 75,000 in Algeria since 1992).

Hoffman shows that religious-inspired terrorism goes way back. The very words zealot, thug, and assassin derive from religious terrorism in, respectively, first-century Judaism, medieval India, and premodern Islamic movements opposing the Christian crusaders. Hoffman also highlights the difference religion makes in the nature of terrorist action. Where most traditional terrorism is motivated by political, social, or economic goals, religious terrorism seeks transcendent justification. The traditional political terrorist wants more people to watch than to be killed. The religious terrorist wants to eliminate the infidels. In the utterly chilling words of Robert Mathews, deceased leader of "The Order" (a splinter from the Aryan Nation/Christian Patriotism/Identity nexus), Jews, blacks, Hispanics, other "mud people," along with white "race traitors," must be exterminated in "a racial and religious Armageddon."

Especially distressing to those who look upon organized religion as a force for good in the world is Hoffman's documentation of the blessing that virtually all recent acts of religious terrorism have received from ministers, rabbis, or imams. Hoffman wonders if the year 2000 will incite aggrieved true believers to millennial acts of terror that could trivialize the difficulties anticipated from computer foul-ups.

Inside Terrorism is an extraordinarily insightful book. But of course it cannot be the last word on its subject. Hoffman mentions the pressures of late twentieth-century demography in sustaining terrorism, but even more could be said. The Brazilian Sem Terra (without land) movement is only one of the groups that promotes local violence to protest the systemic poverty so deeply entrenched and so rapidly spreading in so many parts of the world.

Nor does Hoffman address what might be called the philosophical paradoxes of terror. The African National Congress (including eventually Nelson Mandela) sanctioned terrorism and now, to worldwide acclaim, rules South Africa. Terrorist activity played a part in the creation of modern Israel, Algeria, and Cyprus. As discussed in a recent issue of Books & Culture, John Brown was a terrorist whom many northern abolitionists lionized.

For all who consider what exceptions to the rule of law are justified, for all who worship the Prince of Peace, for all who believe in the power of general revelation to inspire people of goodwill everywhere—and for many more—Hoffman's thoroughly sobering book offers much to grasp, and also much to ponder.

Mark A. Noll teaches history at Wheaton College. He wishes to acknowledge a long friendship with James Ohlson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as essential background for this article.

1. For example, Terrorism in the United States (1996), from the Counterterroism Threat Assessment and Warning Unit of the National Security Division of the FBI, or Patterns of Global Terrorism (1997), from the U.S. Department of State.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.