“I know of no other book so valuable in helping us grasp the nature of our enemies.”

Kind words from “Looking for Trouble” author and New York Post reviewer Ralph Peters for Cambridge author Laurent Murawiec and his new book The Mind of Jihad. Here’s the full review:

Allowing the fanatics who’ve ravaged Islam (and who’ve slaughtered countless Muslims) to speak for themselves, author Laurent Murawiec quotes the late Ayatollah Khomeini: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war . . . I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim . . . A religion without war is a crippled religion. It is war that purifies the earth.”

A notorious ally of Khomeini’s, Ayatollah Khalkali, put it even more bluntly: “Those who are against killing have no place in Islam.”

Those are but two of the hundreds of chilling citations in “The Mind Of Jihad” - a work that needs to be widely read in Washington, where key government organizations forbid the use of the term “Islamist terrorist” to avoid offending our enemies.

Murawiec painstakingly dissects the roots of the current Islamist jihad against our civilization. He employs the extensive Muslim literature on the subject to explode the nonsensical claim that “true jihad” is an innocent personal struggle, rather than a theology of conquest.

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Laurent Murawiec

Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C., author of the just-released The Mind of Jihad

“Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place,” begins a WIRED piece by Bruce Schneier entitled The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists. In his article, Schneier rejects the “strategic model” interpretation of terrorism, an economic model of rational behavior used by some social scientists and experts in matters of terror; he bases his analysis on a paper by Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation: What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategies.

Abrahms tries to show that this model, often applied to the study of terrorism, is unworkable by outlining seven “puzzles,” seven purportedly flawed assumptions about terrorism. He then proceeds to provide his own recipes to grasp and combat terrorism.

Both the author and his commentator unfortunately proceed and outline yet another radical misunderstanding of the matter at hand.

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We get news from Iraq, when it pierces the coverage of our tanking economy, that jihadists are scrambling to assert their cause against a population that is turning away from them. Surprising, but not actually. In a country torn by years of violence, people swept up in the initial rhetoric get sick of it all.

National security blogger Bruce Schneier, writing for WIRED, has identified what he calls the “Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists,” based on a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford’s latest research.

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons. This is the “strategic” model of terrorism, and it’s basically an economic model. It posits that people resort to terrorism when they believe — rightly or wrongly — that terrorism is worth it; that is, when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest.

. . .

Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don’t compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

That’s a fair assessment. Ever see a violent inner-city gang “accomplish” anything? People joining gangs don’t do it for such ends. Understanding terrorism as having political ends, Schneier writes, may mis-read the motivations of jihadists.

The Mind of Jihad will be out in the next few days, and it may fill in some more of the gaps in our understanding. It gives a history and anthropology to terrorists and their methods, effective and otherwise.