I started covering terrorism long before I settled into my small radio booth at the Pentagon in 2005. I could take it back to the beginning of my career in—dare I say—the mid-‘70s. And I certainly dove more deeply into the subject when we lived in Jerusalem in the mid-‘90s, during a period of alternating bus bombings and peace talks.
And that’s why the Task Force Epsilon team finds itself embroiled in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in SHOCK WAVE.
There was a decades-long debate among journalists over whether to use the word “terrorist” at all, and who to designate as such, or whether a term like “militant” was less judgmental. It seems to me that debate has largely fallen by the wayside, with terminology being thrown around with abandon these days. But whether someone is a “terrorist” or a “freedom fighter” depends very much on your point of view.
Many people feel they know all they need to know about terrorism and terrorists from the carnage they see on their TV screens after attacks on innocent civilians.
Such attacks can lead to the labeling of the perpetrators as “animals” and “monsters”—understandable shorthand for men and women who would do such things. But one of the running themes of my novels is that it’s important to remind ourselves that they’re not actually “animals” or “monsters.” They’re human beings.
They’re angry, twisted, brainwashed. Some are amoral, brutal sociopaths. But they’re human beings. There are reasons they do what they do, motivations, rationalizations. And it’s important to have some understanding of that—NOT so we can sympathize with or accept their actions, but so that we can have any hope of addressing the myriad of factors that lead human beings to become involved in such organizations and to commit such atrocities.
This was driven home to me in particular during the first ever Palestinian parliamentary elections in 1996. Traveling the West Bank and Gaza during the campaign, and interviewing supporters of the newly moderate Fatah movement and still militant Hamas, I met people who lived in the same areas, believed in the same religion, and experienced the same recent history, but had come to different conclusions.
The Fatah folks were tired of war and wanted to try to build a society under less-than-ideal conditions. The Hamas faithful were not ready to give up on retaking all of what they considered to be their land.
The militant position was that their goals were righteous—justified by distant and recent history and sanctioned by Islam—and that any compromise was a betrayal of their ancestors, of their children, and of God.
It’s politics wrapped in religion and a culture of victimhood, strong enough to inspire violence, even martyrdom.
At the time, such extreme views seemed quite foreign to most Americans. Nowadays, all you have to do is turn on the news.
One day during the campaign, I visited a Hamas candidate who worked at a youth center in the West Bank city of Hebron. I asked him what he thought when he watched TV coverage of Israeli young people killed and maimed by bus bombs—kids the same age as the Palestinian youths playing basketball in the gym next to his office. The candidate told me he thinks of all the Palestinians killed and persecuted since 1948, and the absolute imperative to end the occupation. For him, it was a holy war, a jihad, and he could muster no sympathy for any dead Israelis, even children.
That’s a viewpoint forged in a crucible I can’t begin to understand. But I need to recognize that it exists.
That same day, I asked a Fatah candidate why polls showed his party doing poorly in spite of the early achievements of the Oslo Accords. He told me, “I am selling the people dreams. Hamas is selling them reality.”
Well, he may not have been entirely correct. Hamas was selling the “reality” of life under occupation, but also the “dream” that militancy and violence would achieve the goals that Fatah had given up on.
Hamas won that election, and the next one, as the “dreams” of the peace process mostly did not come true. The Hamas dream didn’t come true either. But militancy has continued to rise in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere around the world, in spite of the ongoing misery in places where militants hold sway.
That tells you something about the power of the militant narrative.
And that’s why in SANDBLAST I created al-Souri, a man who lost his first wife and two sons fighting the Soviets and then the Americans, and now has a new wife and four young children who must live in a secret location with full-time guards...while he is away, still fighting, decades later. There’s also Zahir, a poor Afghan country boy with no prospects, who finds security, three square meals a day, and meaning for his life in al-Souri’s camp. In BLOWBACK, you have Amira, a young Muslim woman, from the vacuous, dead-end life of working-class South London, who discovers radical Islam online and leaves the unappreciated comforts of home for a jihadist camp in Syria, where she is surprised to find disillusionment and, even more unexpectedly, love.
And in SHOCK WAVE, you’ll meet brother and sister Ayman and Maysoun, twenty-something scions of a well-off and respected Palestinian family with a long history in the jihad. Maysoun is caught between the militancy she learned at home and the liberal values she finds at university. She makes a nearly impossible and life-changing decision, only to have the conflict catch up with her in a way she could neither foresee nor control. Her brother Ayman is a nerd, gamer, and doughboy jihadist wannabe, who finally finds the motivation to do what he was, in a way, conditioned to do all his life. I hope you’ll ask yourselves whether Ayman and Maysoun are villains or victims, or both.
Of course, those are not the heroes of the Task Force Epsilon thrillers. The heroes are Faraz Abdallah and Bridget Davenport and the men and women who fight alongside them to keep America and its allies safe.
Faraz is a Muslim, and there’s obviously a thematic message in that. When we first meet him, he is a twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of UCLA, the son of Afghan refugees who fled the Soviets in the 80s. Faraz joins the U.S. army and is recruited to take on an undercover mission using his ethnicity, religion, and language skills to infiltrate terrorist organizations. And since I’m talking about themes, note that his parents were refugees, a word that has taken on an often-pejorative meaning in recent years. All four of my grandparents and two of my aunts were refugees, and when I was a child it was a term of respect—denoting people who left everything behind to flee persecution and struggle to make a new life in America. Faraz would not have his unique skills and be able to accomplish great things to save American lives, if his parents hadn’t been refugees.
Bridget is an all-American girl from a military family, smart enough and strong enough to graduate from West Point and complete two tours of duty as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. But the “endless war” frustrates her, and leads her to leave the army, get a Ph.D. and join the Defense Intelligence Agency as chief of covert operations in Central Asia. She recruits Faraz, in the process making promises she regrets and may not be able to keep. And while Faraz is in constant danger in terrorist camps, she faces a different type of adversary—recalcitrant generals and a president trying to balance aggressive covert ops with peace talks and politics. In, BLOWBACK and especially in SHOCK WAVE, Bridget escapes the bureaucracy to help Faraz when he needs her most, displaying her bravery, combat skills, and incredible toughness in the process.
This may not have been the booktalk you were expecting, especially if you saw my play. But this is the talk I’ve been wanting to give, to explain myself, to put on the record why I wrote what I wrote.
Also, Audrey said that if I told the story about the Pentagon courtyard again, she’d kill me. I want to thank Audrey for her support for my writing over the years—even though I have become neither rich nor famous...so far.
My thanks also to Michaela Hamilton and the team at Kensington Publishing for taking a chance on a debut author; to the supportive writing community, including my teachers, Barbara Cronie and Barbara Flores; to my friends in Mystery Writers of America, the Florida Writers Association and International Thriller Writers; and especially thank you to my critique partners Caryn, Kelly, Lou-Ann, Marcie, and Porter.
And thank you to Joanne, Stacey, and the staff at Murder on the Beach for their support for me and for the entire South Florida writing community.
In addition, I must say it’s been a special pleasure to have my son Sam, daughter-in-law Steph and grandson Ezra here tonight, all the way from Washington. And you’ll see that SHOCK WAVE is dedicated to Ezra.
Thank you all again for coming and for Zooming in, and for reading the books.
I’m happy to take some questions, although I warn you, if you’re planning to go out on Atlantic Avenue, there are only a few minutes left in Happy Hour.
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