Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [477]
71. Goldberg, “In the Party of God.” Nor are the activities of these extremist groups confined to the Middle East. The Islamists have formed international networks of economic support. They raise money by drug smuggling in Southeast Asia and cigarette smuggling in the United States, two skills which the usually unaffluent adherents may have perfected before their conversion to radical Islam. They also use criminal shakedowns to raise money from Arab shopkeepers throughout the world. The justification is that the money supports the widows and orphans of the suicide bombers. And some of it does, through payments to the families of the suicide bombers, though this is not continuing support and the families are not otherwise specially qualified for public assistance. But a great deal just goes into general funds or supports the ordinary nonsuicide soldiers. Another part of the money raised in these activities is then siphoned off into terrorist operations in non-Palestinian causes, like blowing up synagogues and Jewish civic institutions throughout the world, with prominent success in Argentina and Djerba.
72. ’ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, pp. 196-197. ’Ali makes the important point that the US is also a bastion of fundamentalist education.
73. Ajami, The Dream Falace of the Arabs, p. 312.
74. Kepel, The Revenge of God.
75. A reissue of the text was edited with an introduction by Marsden, The Fundamental. See Barr, Fundamentalism.
76. See Ammerman, “North American Protestant Fundamentalism.”
77. See Kepel, The Revenge of God, pp. 100-39.
78. Literally “tremblers,” the Ḥaredim are the self-styled, only true fearers of God. They take their self-description from Isa 66:2b: “But this is the man to whom I will look, he that is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.
79. See, for example, Lustick, For the Land the Lord; a similar tack is taken by J. Harris in “Fundamentalism.”
80. Lawrence, Defenders of God. Lawrence certainly deserves our thanks for early having pointed out the relationship between fundamentalism and the problematization of modern thought.
81. One thinks, for instance, of the Kiryas Yoel school district in Monsey and the deference shown to the Hasidic community in New York City. New York politics are, in general, more keyed to ethnicity than to political machines, at least in comparison with Chicago. See Fuchs, Mayors and Money.
82. Kepel, The Revenge of God, pp. 140-90.
83. See Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel.
84. Careful thought would reveal that Messianism is not so much a Jewish Biblical belief as a postbiblical Jewish phenomenon, because the term “Messiah” always refers to the ruling king in the Bible and never to a future one. It is postbiblical thought and quintessentially Christianity that finds messianism to be fundamental to Biblical thought.
85. See K. Brown, “Fundamentalism and the Control of Women,” in Hawley, Fundamentalism and Gender.
86. The greatest danger is not just from him but from the fact that his group is but one among many terrorist movements growing out of Islamic fundamentalism. The subsequent defeat of the Taliban, which deprived Osama bin Laden of his sanctuary in Afghanistan, is perhaps one sign that the tide may be turning in the fight against Islamist extremism. Obviously, there have been many terrorist acts on a smaller scale all over the world, both before and after the World Trade Center disaster. The terrible scourge of suicide bombing in Israel is obviously a result of the perceived success of bin Laden’s operation. Under such circumstances, it will take years to root out the feeling that suicide bombing is an efficacious religious action, just as hard as rooting out the many different cells of terrorists around the world.
87. Atran, “Genesis of Suicide Terrorism.”
88. Kepel, Jihad.
89. See the complete analysis of the events in ch. 6 of Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory.
90. Bernall, She Said Yes.
91. See, for example, Lawrence, New Faiths, Old Fears.
92. See Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim; Muslims