America's Secret Jihad
The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The conventional narrative concerning religious terrorism inside the United States says that the first salvo occurred in 1993, with the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. This narrative has motivated more than a decade of wars, and re–prioritized America's domestic security and law enforcement agenda. But the conventional narrative is wrong.
A different group of jihadists exists within US borders. This group has a long but hidden history, is outside the purview of public officials and has an agenda as apocalyptic as anything Al Qaeda has to offer. Radical sects of Christianity have inspired some of the most grotesque acts of violence in American history: the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing that killed four young girls; the "Mississippi Burning" murders of three civil rights workers in 1964; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 1970s; and the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.America's Secret Jihad uses these crimes to tell a story that has not been told before.
Expanding upon the author's ground–breaking work on the Martin Luther King, Jr. murder, and through the use of extensive documentation, never–before–released interviews, and a re–interpretation of major events, America's Secret Jihad paints a picture of Christian extremism and domestic terrorism as it has never before been portrayed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wexler (The Awful Grace of God) convincingly makes the case that America has been victimized by significant domestic terrorism for over half a century, much of it inspired by Christian Identity, a theology that "identifies Jews as the spawn of the devil." He links atrocities familiar (the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995) and less so (attacks on synagogues in the South during the 1950s) to paint a disturbing picture with practical implications for the War on Terror. Most readers will be surprised by the book's contention that since 9/11, more people in the U.S. have been killed by far right extremists than by those linked or sympathetic to al-Qaeda. Wexler's deliberate and critical review of the evidence is also likely to prompt reconsideration of the possibility of wider conspiracies behind Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and the Atlanta child murders of 1979 1981. His careful documentation of a religious as opposed to exclusively racist motivation for these acts of terror buttresses those, like President Obama, who refuse to recast the War on Terror as a War on Radical Islam.
