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4.0 out of 5 stars
Honest, up to a point, June 26, 2004
Rarely does one see a children's book so honest concerning the subject of Islamic fundamentalism. This one is refreshingly frank, up to a point.
Katz opens with a frank four-page section outlining the associations, terminology and major figures backing Islamic terror, or to be blunt, the Islamic war against infidels. The brief introduction follows, with the unflinching fact that such people are bent upon destroying all non-Muslims, as well as western civilization as a whole.
Here, kids will find an honest assessment of 20th and early 21st century Islamic terrorists, including data on some of the worst offenders, including Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and various other organized Islamic murder groups.
The book deals with core Islamic terror leaders worldwide, not the Middle East alone.
The 72-page text is accompanied by an excellent glossary, several maps, a three-page timeline starting with the founding of Islam by Mohammed in 610, and a bibliography and recommended reading on various Internet sites. It's a shame that Robert Spencer's JihadWatch isn't among them.
Katz' five chapters for the most part cover 20th century jihad, beginning with "The Fire is Kindled: Egypt's Jihad warriors;" Egypt being the birth-ground of both al-Banna and Sayed Qutb. This chapter also covers Hamas, and the assassination of Egypt's Anwar el-Sadat by al-Gamal al-Islamiya in the 1970s.
Kids also read about terrorists in Lebanon, where Hezbollah finds backing from Syria and Iran's radical mullahs. In chapter three, they learn about Algeria, where Islamic fascists agitated first against French colonial rule in the 1950s and finally against their own people, murdering some 250,000 Algerians in recent decades.
The fourth chapter covers Al Qaeda's founding by Arab Palestinian Yusuf Azzam, its international network and funding, and many of the other key figures surrounding Osama bin Laden, and now targeted by the U.S. war on terror.
The Epilogue is a brief accounting of how far the western nations must still travel in order to defeat Islamic terrorism, followed by the above mentioned suggestions for further library and online reading.
But in his first chapter, Katz mistakenly casts Islam's earlier eras as more benevolent, even golden. Actually, Islamic history is filled with bloody jihad, beginning with Mohammed's slaughter of Arabia's Jews in Yathrib (later, Medina) and Khaybar. The "lucky" Jewish farmers in Fadak and Wadi'l-Qura, on Palestine's border, were merely enslaved or suffered extortionate taxes. Similarly, Jewish people in Eilat, Maqna and Adhruh had to "accept Islam, or pay the tax, and obey God and His Messenger and the messengers of His Messenger...," to guarantee their security "on land and on sea." Failure ensured Mohammed's promise to "fight you and take you as captives and slay the elderly," threats that were as common in Islamic history as now. In 634, a Syriac chronicle describes a battle 12 miles from Gaza, in which Muslims massacred 4,000 poor Palestinian Christian, Jewish, Samaritan and Arab villagers, according to Moshe Gil, in A History of Palestine: 634-1099 (pp. 21-30).
Jihad effectively destroyed ancient Christian civilization, as Bat Ye'or reports in The Decline of Eastern Christianity, not to mention Persian and Zoroastrian societies. In Asia and the subcontinent, Hindus and Buddhists suffered brutal Islamic rule for 500 years. While thankful for an honest take on the modern facets of the ongoing jihad, I wish Katz had been more thorough concerning Islamic history.
Having said that, this book is a great resource for schools and teachers alike. Librarians should make it a fixture on juvenile non-fiction shelves in every public library in America.
--Alyssa A. Lappen
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