50. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. xvii–xviii.
51. Taleb views the 9/11 attacks, which were committed by a terrorist group, al Qaeda, and not by a lone wolf, as a black-swan event, since they served as evidence that “some events, owing to their dynamics, stand largely outside the realm of the predictable” and were an example of the “built-in defect of conventional wisdom” (Black Swan, p. xxi). However, I do not view the 9/11 attacks as a black-swan event, since while they certainly had an extreme impact in the United States and elsewhere, it is questionable whether they were beyond our realm of normal expectations. There had been suicide terrorist attacks on the ground in Lebanon and elsewhere during the 1980s as well as a suicide attack at sea on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. It was therefore just a matter of time before terrorists escalated to suicide attacks from the air.
52. Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, p. 3.
53. Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction, US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA-BP-ISC-115 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, December 1993), p. 71.
54. David A. Relman, “Bioterrorism—Preparing to Fight the Next War,” New England Journal of Medicine 354, no. 2 (2006): 113–15; cited in Richard J. Danzig, A Policymaker's Guide to Bioterrorism and What to Do about It, Center for Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense University, December 2009, p. 9.
55. Danzig, Policymaker's Guide, pp. 9–10.
56. Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, pp. 2–3.
57. Ibid., p. 3.
58. “Safety of Nuclear Power Reactors,” World Nuclear Association, October 31, 2011, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html (accessed November 28, 2011).
59. Allison, Nuclear Terrorism, p. 46.
60. Brian Michael Jenkins, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), p. 372.
CHAPTER 4. WHERE ARE THE WOMEN?
1. David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” in Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy, ed. Audrey Kurth Cronin and James M. Ludes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), p. 51.
2. Amy Knight, “Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party,” Russian Review 38, no. 2 (April 1979): 139.
3. Ibid.
4. Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1987), p. 79.
5. Knight, “Female Terrorists,” p. 139.
6. Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 91.
7. All the hostages from the other hijacked planes were also eventually released in exchange for Palestinian militants in prisons in Switzerland, West Germany, and Britain. Israel also released a number of Palestinian and Libyan prisoners after the hostages were freed but denied that this was part of any deal with the hijackers. All the planes (with the exception of one) had been diverted to Jordan, where, after taking the hostages and crew off the planes, the terrorists blew the planes up on the ground. They did the same thing in Cairo with the Pan Am jet that they hijacked and forced to land there. See Jeffrey D. Simon, The Terrorist Trap: America's Experience with Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 97–106.
8. Ibid, pp. 110–19. Before surrendering in Paris, the hijackers cut up pieces of the fake clay bombs and gave them to the passengers as souvenirs!
9. Ibid., p. 117.
10. MacDonald, Shoot the Women First, pp. 127–28.
11. Simon, Terrorist Trap, p. 118.
12. Thomas Strentz, “The Stockholm Syndrome: Law Enforcement Policy and Hostage Behavior,” Victims of Terrorism, ed. Frank M. Ochberg and David A. Soskis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), pp. 149–63.
13. Simon, Terrorist Trap, p. 114.
14. Ibid., p. 343.
15. MacDonald, Shoot the Women First, p. 104.
16. Ibid., pp. 104–105.
17. Ibid., p. xiv.
18. Simon, Terrorist Trap, pp. 339–40.
19. Cindy D. Ness, “In the Name of the Cause: Women's Work in Secular and Religious Terrorism,” in Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization, ed. Cindy D. Ness (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 13.
20. MacDonald, Shoot the Women First, p. 198. Both Baader and Meinhof committed suicide while in prison in the 1970s.
21. Margaret Gonzalez-Perez, Women and Terrorism: Female Activity in Domestic and International Terror Groups (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 117–18.
22. Simon, Terrorist Trap, p. 320.
23. “‘The Urban Guerrilla Is History’: The Final Communiqué from the Red Army Faction (RAF),” German Guerilla, March 1998, http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/98_03.html (accessed September 5, 2009).
24. One of the members of the Weather Underground was Judith Clark, who was a classmate of mine at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1960s. Clark is currently serving three consecutive twenty-five-years-to-life sentences in a New York state prison for her participation in a Brinks armored truck robbery and murders that occurred in Nyack, New York, in 1981. During the trial, she and her two codefendants claimed that the robbery was an “expropriation” needed to finance a revolution against the United States. Another classmate of mine had a different experience with terrorism. Miriam Beeber was one of the hostages taken by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine when it hijacked four planes on the same day in September 1970. She was eventually freed after spending several weeks in captivity in Jordan. When I looked at my high-school yearbook for the first time in decades, I was surprised to discover that Clark, Beeber, and I appeared together in a group photo for the honor society. When I related that story during a radio call-in show, a person called the show and wanted to know if the name of my high school was Terror High!
25. This religious wave, as noted in chapter 1, was characterized by David Rapoport as the fourth wave of modern terrorism.
26. The fervent belief that God is on one's side is also the reason why it is more difficult to bring about an end, whether negotiated or forced, to a religious-inspired terrorist movement than it is to bring about an end to a secular one. In the case of political and ethnic-nationalist terrorist movements, several things can happen to end the hostilities. For example, a group that is driven by a desire for a homeland, a separate state, or the overthrow of a government will end its terrorist acts once that homeland or state is achieved or the government overthrown. A political terrorist group can also fade from the scene as members are arrested and it becomes difficult to find new recruits, or when the issues for which it fought are either resolved or are no longer seen as important by members of the group. Political terrorists may also decide, once they get older, to simply retire from the terrorist life. This is not likely to happen in the case of the religious terrorist. Religious terrorism cannot be resolved by political agreements (like the Northern Ireland conflict, which was more of a political than a religious conflict). Compromise is not in the vocabulary of the religious extremist, who may view anything short of a complete victory as failing in the eyes of God.
27. Hezbollah also bombed the barracks of the French contingent of the Multinational Force in Lebanon the same day it attacked the US Marine barracks (October 23, 1984).
28. Yoram Schweitzer, “Suicide Terrorism: Development & Characteristics,” International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, April 21, 2000, http://www.ict.org.il/Articles/tabid/66/Articlsid/42/Default.aspx (accessed December 23, 2011).
29. Ness, “In the Name of the Cause,” p. 19.
30. “The Role of Palestinian Women in Suicide Terrorism,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, January 30, 2003, http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2003/1/The%20Role%20of%20Palestinian%20Women%20in%20Suicide%20Terrorism (accessed December 24, 2011).
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Alissa J. Rubin, “Despair Drives Suicide Attacks by Iraqi Women,” N
ew York Times, July 5, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/world/middleeast/05diyala.html?pagewanted=all (accessed December 25, 2011).
34. Rohan Gunaratna, “Suicide Terrorism: A Global Threat,” PBS Frontline/World, October 2000, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/srilanka/globalthreat.html (accessed December 25, 2011).
35. Steve Emerson, “Female Suicide Bombers Raise Deadly Stakes,” Newsmax, March 29, 2010, http://www.newsmax.com/Emerson/femalesuicidebombers-terrorists-Hamas/2010/03/29/id/354164 (accessed December 24, 2011).
36. Mia Bloom, Bombshell: Women and Terrorism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 233–49. Bloom notes that another “R,” which stands for rape, can be added to the list. She points out (p. 236) that in Iraq and Chechnya rape was used “to coerce women to participate in combat.”
37. See chapter 1 and the appendix for my definition of lone wolf terrorism.
38. Lone-Wolf Terrorism, COT, Instituut voor Veiligheids- en Crisismanagement, Final draft, June 7, 2007, Case Study for Work Package 3, p. 24, http://www.scribd.com/doc/34968770/Lone-Wolf-Terrorism (accessed June 10, 2011), pp. 98–111. The only female lone wolf attack recorded for this period occurred in Wichita, Kansas, when Rachelle Shannon shot and wounded George Tiller, a late-term abortion doctor, outside his clinic in August 1993. Tiller would again be the target of an anti-abortion lone wolf when Scott Roeder assassinated him in Wichita in July 2009.
39. Cristen Conger, “What Is a Lone Wolf?” Animal Planet, http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/lone-wolf.htm (accessed December 27, 2011).
40. Alison Jamieson, “Entry, Discipline, and Exit in the Italian Red Brigades,” Terrorism and Political Violence 2, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 18–19.
41. Christine R. Harris, Michael Jenkins, and Dale Glaser, “Gender Difference in Risk Assessment: Why Do Women Take Fewer Risks Than Men?” Judgment and Decision Making 1, no. 1 (July 2006): 48–63.
42. Ibid, p. 49.
43. David Weidner, “Women Are Better Investors, and Here's Why,” Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2011, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/women-are-better-investors-and-heres-why-2011-06-14?pagenumber=1 (accessed December 27, 2011).
44. Nigel Barber, “Why Women Live Longer Than Men,” Psychology Today, August 10, 2010, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201008/why-women-live-longer-men (accessed December 27, 2011).
45. Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales, and Dario Maestripieri, “Gender Differences in Financial Risk Aversion and Career Choices Are Affected by Testosterone,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, August 24, 2009, http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/20/0907352106 (accessed December 28, 2011).
46. Laura Madson and David Trafimow, “Gender Comparisons in the Private, Collective, and Allocentric Selves,” Journal of Social Psychology 141, no. 4 (2001): 552.
47. Stephanie S. Covington, “The Relational Theory of Women's Psychological Development: Implications for the Criminal Justice System,” in Female Offenders: Critical Perspectives and Effective Interventions, 2nd ed., ed. Ruth T. Zaplin (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2007), pp. 135–64.
48. Sarah Ben-David, “The Two Facets of Female Violence: The Public and the Domestic Domains,” Journal of Family Violence 8, no. 4 (December 1993): 352.
49. See chapter 7 for a further discussion of the role of psychology in explaining lone wolf terrorism.
50. Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld, “Gender and Health Status,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, ed. Janet Saltzman Chafetz (New York: Springer), p. 476.
51. “Paranoid Schizophrenia: Definition,” Mayo Clinic, December 16, 2010, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/paranoid-schizophrenia/DS00862 (accessed December 29, 2011).
52. “Health Guide: Schizophrenia,” New York Times, January 27, 2011, http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/schizophrenia/risk-factors.html (accessed December 26, 2011).
53. “Paranoid Schizophrenia: Symptoms,” Mayo Clinic, December 16, 2010, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/paranoid-schizophrenia/DS00862/DSECTION=symptoms (accessed December 29, 2011).
54. Richard Howard and Conor Duggan, “Mentally Disordered Offenders: Personality Disorders,” in Forensic Psychology, ed. Graham J. Towl and David A. Crighton (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 321.
55. “Antisocial Personality Disorder: Definition,” Mayo Clinic, October 8, 2010, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/antisocial-personality-disorder/DS00829 (accessed December 29, 2011).
56. “Antisocial Personality Disorder: Symptoms,” Mayo Clinic, October 8, 2010, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/antisocial-personality-disorder/DS00829/DSECTION=symptoms (accessed December 29, 2011).
57. “Schizoid Personality Disorder: Causes,” Mayo Clinic, December 8, 2010, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/schizoid-personality-disorder/DS00865/DSECTION=causes (accessed January 1, 2012).
58. Michael H. Stone, The Anatomy of Evil (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), p. 190; Anna Motz, The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes against the Body, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 271.
59. Ben-David, “Two Facets of Female Violence,” p. 347.
60. Shauna Bottos, “Women and Violence: Theory, Risk, and Treatment Implications,” Research Branch, Correctional Service Canada, July 2007, p. 22.
61. Simon, Terrorist Trap, p. 23.
62. Most of the following account of LaRose's Internet activity (unless otherwise noted) is derived from the text of her federal indictment and a superseding indictment. See In the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, United States of America v. Colleen R. LaRose, a/k/a “Fatima LaRose,” a/k/a “JihadJane,” Case 2:10-cr-00123-PBT, Document 23, Criminal No. 10, Date Filed: March 4, 2010; In the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, United States of America v. Colleen R. LaRose, a/k/a “Fatima LaRose,” a/k/a “JihadJane,” [and defendant] Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, Case 2:10-cr-00123-PBT, Document 31, Criminal No. 10-123, Date Filed: April 1, 2010.
63. Ian Urbina, “Views of ‘JihadJane’ Were Unknown to Neighbors,” New York Times, March 10, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/us/11pennsylvania.html (accessed June 22, 2010).
64. David Sapsted, “‘Jihad Jane’ Was Tracked by Amateur Internet Sleuths,” National, March 18, 2010, http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100317/FOREIGN/703169948/1013/ART (accessed June 22, 2010).
65. Maryclaire Dale, “‘Jihad Jane’ Terror Suspect Pleads Guilty in PA,” Associated Press, February 1, 2011, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41374247/ns/us_news-security/t/jihad-jane-terror-suspect-pleads-guilty-pa/#.TwOhkRw0jw5 (accessed January 3, 2012); Peter Hall, “‘Jihad Jane’ Codefendant Pleads Guilty to Terrorism Charge,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/10/nation/la-na-terror-plea-20110310 (accessed January 3, 2012).
66. Urbina, “Views of ‘JihadJane’ Were Unknown to Neighbors”; Sapsted, “‘Jihad Jane’ Was Tracked by Amateur Internet Sleuths”; Eamon McNiff, “Net Posse Tracked ‘Jihad Jane’ for Three Years,” ABC News, March 11, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/Technology/internet-monitors-tracked-jihad-jane-years/story?id=10069484 (accessed June 14, 2010).
67. Raffaello Pantucci, “Trial of Would-Be Assassin Illustrates al-Awlaki's Influence on the British Jihad,” Jamestown Foundation, December 2, 2010, http://www.jamestown.org/programs/gta/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=37234&cHash=873daf2211 (accessed January 3, 2012).
68. Vikram Dodd, “Profile: Roshonara Choudhry,” Guardian, November 2, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/02/profile-roshonara-choudhry-stephen-timms (accessed January 3, 2012).
69. Vikram Dodd, “Roshonara Choudhry: Police Interview Extracts,” Guardian, November 3, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/03/roshonara-choudhry-police-interview (accessed December 29, 2011). Choudhry also told police that she was influenced by a YouTube video she watched in April 2010 by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, who was a Palestinian Islamic milita
nt killed in 1989. Choudhry told the detectives that Azzam said that “when a Muslim land is attacked it becomes obligatory on every man, woman and child and even slave to go out and fight and defend the land and the Muslims.”
70. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005), pp. 107, 111, 120, 132, 157, 158, 316; cited in Jeffrey D. Simon, “The Forgotten Terrorists: Lessons from the History of Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 20, no. 2 (April/June 2008): 196.
71. Dodd, “Roshonara Choudhry: Police Interview Extracts.”
72. Pantucci, “Trial of Would-Be Assassin.”
73. Vikram Dodd, “Roshonara Choudhry: I Wanted to Die…I Wanted to be a Martyr,” Guardian, November 3, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/04/stephen-timms-attack-roshonara-choudhry (accessed December 29, 2011).
74. Dodd, “Roshonara Choudhry: Police Interview Extracts.”
75. Dodd, “Profile: Roshonara Choudhry.”
76. Dodd, “Roshonara Choudhry: Police Interview Extracts.”
77. “Student Jailed for Stabbing of MP Stephen Timms,” Channel 4 News, November 3, 2010, http://www.channel4.com/news/student-jailed-for-stabbing-of-mp-stephen-timms (accessed January 4, 2012).
CHAPTER 5. LONE WOLF ASSASSINS
1. Maximilien Robespierre gave birth to the term terrorism by unleashing his Reign of Terror between 1793 and 1794 upon all strata of French society. The Committee on Public Safety that ruled France following the French Revolution can be considered the first case of state terror imposed upon a people. It was the forerunner of twentieth-century terror governments such as Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. Robespierre viewed terror as the only way to save the revolution from anarchy at home and the threat of invasion from abroad by European monarchs. More than seventeen thousand people, ranging from peasants and workers to aristocrats and moderate revolutionaries, met their deaths by the guillotine, while approximately twenty-five thousand others were shot or killed by different methods throughout the country. There were more than one hundred thousand political prisoners taken, while several hundred thousand others were declared suspects. Robespierre did not view terrorism as an evil or immoral act but instead thought of it as a virtuous deed. “If the basis of popular government in time of peace is virtue,” he argued, “the basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue without which terror is murderous, terror without which virtue is powerless.” See Jeffrey D. Simon, The Terrorist Trap: America's Experience with Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 27–29. The word terrorism first appeared in the 1798 supplement of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, as meaning a “système, régime de la terreur.” See Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1987), p. 11.
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