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[P]roto-apocalyptic texts are not products of groups that are alienated, marginalized, or even relatively deprived. Rather, they stem from groups allied with or identical to the priests at the center of restoration society. First, the proto-apocalyptic description of the end-time assault of “Gog of Magog” in Ezekiel 38-39 expresses the same central-priestly motifs and concerns as the rest of the book of Ezekiel. Second, proto-apocalyptic texts in Zechariah 1-8 appear to have been written in support of the Second Temple establishment.42

Cook forgets that the societies that produce these movements are ones in which religon is the dominant language, not politics or economics. The nature of the deprivation is likely to be expressed in religious rather than economic or political terms. As well, Cook takes no account of the issues of colonial and imperial oppression and the reactions of the various subgroups that form in this situation. But, there is an important sense in which Cook’s hypothesis is true. The suicide hijackers of 9/11/01 were not the most materially deprived of the Arab world. On the contrary, they were quite privileged. One needs education and economic power to accomplish such ends. This is why Cook says that it is not deprivation that causes these groups.

But his notion of deprivation is just too narrow. The young Arab terrorists’ very willingness to pursue Western occupations and their failure to gain jobs equal to their achievement was apparently a motive in their movement into Islamist extremism. They were also educated in strongly Muslim schools where the reasons for this disparity were sought in religious terms. So we need some more subtle notions of what deprivation is, to understand religious impulses towards martyrdom and the way notions of the afterlife feed it.

Terrorists are often members of both the dominant and the subdominant groups but failures in their own aspirations. Having been educated in radical fundamentalist Madrassas (religious schools) that Islam is the highest and most perfect religion, they then take their technical training to Europe and the United States where they see that Islamic countries rank far behind the European and American world in political rights, economic development, and social freedoms. Or, they remain in Muslim societies in which they have no real opportunity to practice their technical skills. The only freedom and opportunity which presented itself in the 90s was to fight as a mujahid against the Russians, where the young warriors were brought under the influence of extremist thinkers like Osama bin Laden and also witnessed the defeat of the Russian invaders and the diffidence of American aid.

This dissonant situation can be explained basically by either one of two different tacks: Either the Islamic world is not as perfect as they previously had been taught or the Western world had stolen these technical treasures from its rightful owners, the pious Muslims, and, with it, stolen Muslim dignity. Of course, the real culprits here are the failed and repressive Muslim states in which they were raised and the almost magical notion of the success of Islam which they were taught in fundamentalist Madrassas.

But facing the fact that the naive Islam they were taught may itself have contributed to their wildly exaggerated self-perceptions is unthinkable to a person with that education. Because of the immoral ways of the West, the violence of the Zionist interloper on Arab territory, and the constant exhortation to hatred of people whose lives are different, the way of violence against the outsider is both possible and satisfying. It gives vent to rage and personifies the evil as something outside the body of Islam, just as surely as the projection of personal impulses onto the world as Satan excuses the bad behavior of Christian fundamentalists. While the first realization might lead to political reform, the second avoids the indignity of the first and leads to Islamic extremism. What Israel