WALTER LAQUEUR
What to Read (and Not to Read) about
Terrorism
W
HAT TO READ ABOUT TERRORISM?
The books on terrorism
published before September
2001
did not become bestsellers.
The two academic journals covering terrorism had a few
hundred subscribers each worldwide; I doubt whether any major library
in Washington, D.C., except the Library of Congress subscribed to
them . This has changed during the last year-almost anything on
Afghanistan or entitled
Jihad
was in sudden demand. Those who had
been right most of the time, I am told, sold about as many copies as
those who had been consistently wrong.
Quickest off the mark were the conspiracy theorists. The basic
assumption in most of these cases was that the attacks had been carried
out by Americans in order to save their economy, to protect their
empire, and to strengthen their position in the world. According to
some of the many and enormously long explanations (mostly on the
Internet) it appeared that the attacks had something
to
do with the
naval battle of Lepanto
(1571)
which had occurred on the very same
day the American offensive in Afghanistan took place. According to
others the events in Manhattan and Washington could not be under–
stood without a knowledge of Kabbalah symbolism. But there were also
books which claimed that no plane had ever crashed into the Pentagon
(II
septembre
2001:
L'effroyable imposture,
by Thierry Meyssan) and
those which did not deny the attack but argued that bin Laden and al
Qaeda were creatures of the American government and u .S. oil interests
(Ben Laden: La verite interdite,
by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume
Dasquie). This argument had been pursued by a whole school of writ–
ers in France well before September
II.
According to Lyndon
LaRouche, bin Laden is a British agent, and according to others, for
instance on the Russian extreme Right, he is a Jewish and perhaps even
Zionist agent acting on behalf of Wall Street.
While most of the conspirational literature was in French and German
(and Arabic), the authors claimed that more than half of their readers
were located in the United States, which has a hallowed tradition of belief
