Stern in Real Clear Politics: ISIS and the Gray Zone
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was a speaker at the recent Faith Angle Forum, a meeting that convenes journalists and scholars to delve deeply into issues related to religion, culture and current events.
Stern’s remarks from the forum were quoted in a March 20, 2016 article on Real Clear Politics entitled “How Trump Helps ISIS.”
From the text of the article:
In Terror in the Name of God, a scholarly book I’d recommend to Donald Trump—and our current commander-in-chief, for that matter—Boston University professor Jessica Stern documents why jihadists launch terrorist attacks against innocents in the U.S. and Europe. One reason is to make moderate Muslims living in the West—a vast swath of the world community that ISIS leaders term the “gray zone”—feel afraid. Another is to fuel the kind of backlash represented by Trump and his followers.
“They want to make Muslims in the West feel unsafe,” she said. “They also want to increase prejudice against Muslims in the West.”
Jessica Stern’s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. She has been working with a team at Boston Children’s Hospital on the risk factors for violence among Somali-refugee youth. She is currently working on a study of Radovan Karadzic, indicted for war crimes in Bosnia. Read more about her here.