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Book Review: Fighting Terrorism by Benjamin Netanyahu
Posted on Sunday 03 March @ 17:37:18
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Every week (or thereabout) HGLEE.COM will review a book or film. Each work will have a brief review and a quick link to Amazon, should you decide to pick up a copy for yourself. This week's selection: Benjamin Netanyahu's Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists.
This work is an exceptionally honest perspective on the nature of and driving forces behind the use of terrorism as a political weapon. Netanyahu, like few others, refuses to mince words and relinquish the moral ground when chronicling the "deliberate and systematic assault on civilians to inspire political ends."
Voltaire wrote that there are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts. Unlike those who brandish obfuscation and appeasement as political weaponry (q.v., Bill Clinton and Colin Powell), Netanyahu uses his writing to convincingly dismantle the nature of terrorism at its most vulnerable place: its philosophy. He brings to bear a clarity of vision—coupled with a compelling and well researched historical record—to show that terrorism, in the light of day, is far from a just cause.
While a fair amount of focus seems to be on Yasser Arafat, a writer of the root cause of terrorism is hard-pressed to pick a more perfect subject than this Lebanese butcher. While Arafat is the very embodiment of the mentality behind the brutality, Netanyahu does not dwell on the men behind the terror but rather motivation behind men of terror.
Accordingly, while the bulk of his work appropriately focuses on the Middle East (the birthplace of modern terrorism), he elucidates many of the causes behind terrorism on both a domestic and an international scale—from the Oklahoma and New York Trade Tower bombings (the book was written in 1995) to the rise of the PLO and other European terrorist organizations as puppets for a corrupt Soviet regime. Netanyahu's principled argument and clear writing style are only made more stark by the compelling historical record that leads him to his final conclusion.
The history of terrorism is not light reading, but it is crucial to known thine enemy. Netanyahu details the mentality behind this enemy by showing that "[i]t is not only that the ends of the terrorists do not succeed in justifying the means they choose; their choice of means indicates what their true ends are."
The overall purpose of the book is to demonstrate that a philosophical response (Netanyahu calls it a moral response) is the only means of defeating terrorism. To be more precise, terrorists can be defeated, but only if decent people uproot it properly, once and for all, without moral compunctions of any kind.
The book is replete with historical fact not reported in any of today's ludicrously biased media, and it concludes with specific remedies not dreamed of by liberal appeasers who wish to grant murderers an equal voice at the international bargaining table. (Many of these rememdies finally are being enacted after September 11.) This is a remarkably well written book; I just pray that our leaders digest its message in time.
Purchase:
See all HGLEE.COM book reviews.
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