Reference Reviews
Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
October 2007
Title: Encyclopedia of Terrorism
Publisher: Sage Publications (print), Gale (digital)
URL: http://www.terrorisminfo.mipt.org/Resources/WarAndTerrorism.asp
Cost: free through the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), registration required
Tested: October 3–17, 2007
The Context
After 9/11 bookstores were full of fiction and non-fiction books about terrorism, but current ready reference works were not available. Most of the terrorism–related encyclopedias were from the 1980s and mid–1990s, such as the Encyclopedia of Terrorism and Political Violence of Routledge, the International Encyclopedia of Terrorism of Fitzroy Dearborn, or the Encyclopedia of World Terrorism of Sharpe Reference.
It was late 2002 and early 2003 when a series of good and very good encyclopedias about terrorism appeared, including the Encyclopedia of Terrorism of Facts on File, the Dictionary of Terrorism of Routledge (which actually is an encyclopedia with encyclopedia–length articles rather than a mere dictionary), the Terrorism Reference Library of Gale, and the Terrorism Library series by Lucent. Unfortunately, no encyclopedia can be current as terrorist acts are committed almost every day somewhere in the world, and if not, then new terrorists and terror projects are conceived or born. As of this writing the Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Terrorism and Terrorism 101 are the most current encyclopedias on the subject, but their currency will also fade. For currency, (and guided search options) nothing beats the top notch Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB) developed by MIPT which I reviewed two years ago. All these reference sources contribute to get the whole picture about terrorism and terrorists, way beyond what the shallow and loud television news and talk shows offer.
It is not easy to write a review of an encyclopedia or other reference source, as the topic is so controversial, and many readers can be so prejudiced that no matter what is written about the source, there will be e–mails voicing strong disagreement with my opinion, to say the least. I still do it, because terrorism–related good quality reference sources are important.
This encyclopedia was and remains a much needed resource after the extremely large scale, unprecedentedly traumatic attacks on an entirely unprepared nation with and appallingly unprepared government that missed the signs. It is quite telling that the 2001 September 10th issue of TIME magazine had a lead piece with the moralizing title "Does Israel Have A Right To Assassinate Leaders Of The Palestinian Intifadeh?", yes with that spelling of the Arabic word for uprise while the terrorists from the region were going through the last rites and verbal rehearsals before steering jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House the next morning, not only to assassinate the leaders of the United States, but thousands of average civilians in the most terrorizing way that not even Hollywood special effects masters could have imagined. You may read the answer of two prominent literary–ideological figures, but that’s not the point here, it is just a snippet that I use to illustrate the mindset of the day: philosophizing about events and actions "over there", when something of far larger scale is to unfold within hours over here, in our very own backyard.
There have been many sources providing all the details about the how–s and when–s of the events, but here has been a hiatus in ready reference sources to help in learning more about the motivation, the context, and the people involved in terrorism. This encyclopedia served and still serves very well that purpose.
The Content
It is for good reason that the encyclopedia won the most prestigious awards for reference works straight in a row, including the Library Journal 2002 Best Reference Title, the RUSA 2003 Outstanding Reference Source and Booklist Editor's Choice Best of 2003.
Coverage
There are 310 articles in the Encyclopedia of Terrorism, which was edited by one of the real experts of the topic, Harvey Kushner, with the contributions of other specialists of the field. The encyclopedia has a broad coverage of all types, forms and persons of terrorism from anarchy and anarchists to all types, forms and persons of zealotry and zealots, although there are some strange omissions, discussed below at some lengths.
It has the emphasis on the contemporary aspects of terrorism, covering very well the movements, the protagonists, the events of violent threats and actions of the past 40 years, motivated by political and other reasons, and by no reason at all, except for the enigmatic and derailed mental state of individuals acting alone or in small groups to take revenge in the extremes and strike terror in the heart and mind of millions.
It was a good choice not to enhance the coverage of the encyclopedia back to the acts of terrorism in the first century, not even to the 18th and 19th centuries, but focus on the past few decades, to get this encyclopedia out in a reasonable time with reasonably practical content.
Although the Chronology section formally goes back to 1865 when the Ku Klux Klan was established, there are only 10 events listed before 1968 —which is fine for the contemporary emphasis. What is not very fine, is the even treatment of events on the time line which are of different magnitude. It is strange that there is space for every bank robberies of second class terrorist organizations even when no one was killed or hurt, but there is no entry in the time line for the assassinations of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by one of his compatriot, a law student —to punish Rabin for the peace talks. It is strange when the entry about the sabotage against a power line, or a threatening phone call to First Data Corporation get as long an entry as the one about the Oklahoma city bombing in the Chronology section.
The unusual but very useful Readers’Guide clearly depicts the 32 understandably overlapping categories that form the framework for the 300+ articles related to groups from the Abu Nidal Organization and Al Fatah, through Al Qaeda’s leaders, and actions to Hamas, Hezbollah and the White Supremacist Groups in America, in the four corners of the world. Equally important are the clusters by methods and targets of terrorist acts.
Omissions
Having said all this, I must add that there are some strange omissions. For example, there is no information at all about the terrorist attacks against the airports of Vienna and Rome on the same day, December 27 in 1985.
Neither is there any mention of the OAS, the Organization of the Secret Army, which committed a series of terrorist attacks in Paris and other French cities against department stores, and other public places, killing and maiming hundreds in the 1960s in France alone, beyond the victims of the waves of terror within Algeria between the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the OAS.
On the individual and group level there are some omissions, too. There is nothing about Haiti and the Tonton Macoutes, the voluntary army of thugs, which terrorized Haiti for decades of the father and son dictator generation of the Duvaliers. There is an entry about this brutal ragtag band even in single volume general interest encyclopedias, such as the excellent Columbia Encyclopedia or equally excellent Encarta.
The Chechens don’t appear in the encyclopedia, although they use terror against elementary children and airline passengers for their separatist movement, neither does Abu Bakar, even though he founded the terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah (Islamic Group), he has been the spiritual instigator behind many terrorist attacks, and was convicted in court in his native Indonesia, the largest Muslim country. The Encyclopedia of U.S. National Security from Sage, (also published by Gale in its ever growing Virtual Reference Library), has information about the Encarta founder of the Islamic Group.
The Encyclopedia of Terrorism has no information about this wing of the Islamic Group, in its entry under the different transliteration, Gama'a al-Islamiyya, which discusses only the Egyptian militant group. David Duke who has been mostly busy as a leader and spokeperson for the KKK, managed to make it to the House of Louisiana for one term, and a little longer to make it to the Big House for mail and tax fraud, but has not made it to the encyclopedia, which otherwise covers well other white supremacists.
On the other end of the spectrum, there is no entry about Avraham Stern and the LEHI, the acronym for Freedom Fighters for Israel in Hebrew, the underground group which had indicated its disagreement with the British administration through bombings. For fairness, there is cross reference from Avraham Stern to both the lengthy entry of Irgun, the other main Zionist underground group, and to the Stern Gang an entry fom LEHI in the index.
The omissions represent less than 5% of my test terms. The only weak point in the encyclopedia is the treatment of the Weather Underground members, who indeed managed "to bring the war home". The movement itself is covered in one article under the Weatherman heading, but there is no entry under its later name Weather Underground. There is no mention at all of Jane Alpert in this encyclopedia although she even wrote a book purportedly about her years growing up underground, which caused less damage (to others) than to her image as one of the amy Weatherwomen. The memoir was appropriately characterized in a review as a bodice ripper and girly diary in the New York Times. There is no word about Jeff Jones, who was one the founders of Weatherman. Many of the Weathermen and Weatherwomen such as Mark Rudd, James Mellen, Cathy Wilkerson, David Gilbert are mentioned —but barely— in the articles about Weatherman and the May 19 Communist Organization.
Most surprisingly, you will not find a main entry of William Ayers, a central figure in the Weatherman then in the Weather Underground, and not unimportantly, the son of Thomas Ayers (the long–time member and chair of the Board of Regents of Northwestern University). He gets a passing mention in the main entry about Bernardine Dohrn, his girlfriend (then wife) and sister in arms. True, Ayers is junior to Dohrn, but they have been equally violent and brutal not only in their terrorist actions, but also in their North Korean style agit–prop verbiage, braggadocio and —much worse— in their, debased rhetoric to dehumanize innocent victims of terrorism as did Dohrn, on reacting to the Sharon Tate massacre, or urging their groupies to "kill your parents" as Ayers kept inciting them.
Later, when Dohrn came out of the fugitive life, she referred to her depraved comment as a joke. We don’t know who was laughing, but after she resurfaces and did time, she was certainly going laughing to the bank after she was hired to be an associate professor in a law school. Which one? Northwestern University in Chicago. Not to be outdone, University of Illinois promoted Ayers to a distinguished professor of education. We don’t know yet which academic institutes will make an offer to hire Zacarias Moussaoui to teach aerodynamics, but it is in the air if he does not land in prison or gets paroled very early.
It is more than eerie to read in the September 11, 2001 issue of –what else– the New York Times, which graced Ayers with a portrait to help with his promotional tour of his book, that "everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon" which he then denies by qualification, to have his cake and eat it too. This is the main attitude in his narcissistic, self–aggrandizing fiction, rather than memoir as the subtitle claims, which is as much an autobiography as was the "Million Pieces".
It is strange that such a prominent terrorist got merely a passing mention in the encyclopedia, otherwise filled with useful biographical articles of terrorists.
Article content
The articles are substantial entries averaging about 1.5 printed page in a single volume of 550 pages (which luckily does not matter in the digital version). The articles are usually proportional to the importance, fame and/or infamy of the subjects, event or the persons. For example, Arafat has longer entries than Abbas, even if the latter succeeded the former as head of the Palestinian Authority, after the encyclopedia was published, Of course Arafat is not reported dead in the encyclopedia, neither is Saddam Hussein, because the encyclopedia was closed late in 2002, but not the life of these two terrorists.
The articles are well written, the cross references to main entries in the encyclopedia are informative and the list of further readings after many of the articles provide very appropriately chosen books, articles and government documents. The latter are enhanced with links for instant access as shown by the entry about Abbas, who is the current head of Palestinian Authority, having replaced Arafat who clung to this position until he had a pulse.
The appendixes enrich the content of the articles. The maps of the continents show well the hottest points around the world, but the important captions are hard to read. There is a very good Web directory of 110 important sites for the subject of terrorism, even if some may not seem like that, such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention —until you think of Anthrax, bioterrorism, and chemical terrorism. These are presented alphabetically within major categories (government and international agencies, NGOs, and Web sites of journals, and TV stations). The Bibliography section at the end of the encyclopedia pulls together the entries displayed after the entries, and it is an asset. The weak point of the encyclopedia is the imbalance in the Chronology section as I mentioned earlier. The only other weak component of the encyclopedia is the set of illustrations. There are very few (less than 40), and they don’t prove that a picture is worth a thousand words.
The editor could not include the most important Web site, because it was not set up in 2002 —it is the MIPT site which makes available free of charge this very encyclopedia among its many digital assets.
The Software
The encyclopedia is part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library collection, so the same software is used with it as with the several hundred other e–books in the collection. It has the advantage that many users will be familiar with the software options available.
Because most of the field–specific search options and filters to limit the search by various criteria, such as publication year range, target audience, full text availability, peer–reviewed status, etc. are not applicable for the encyclopedia, I don’t dwell on software issues for long.
Suffice it to say, that the articles are available both in HTML and PDF formats, which is a good idea. There is a basic and advanced search mode, as well as a command mode operation. The "Basic" mode allows a quick search in the indexes generated from the document title (in this case the encyclopedia article is the document), or from the keywords, or from the full text of the articles. The default option is keyword as usual. It is practical for the large full text databases, and especially the mega databases to keep the result set within a feasible subject domain, but I think the full text would be a better option for the default for the encyclopedia as there are only 310 articles in it. It is another question that full text search in one case produced more results than it should, and brought up articles which don’t include the search term.
The Encyclopedia of Terrorism of Sage is a very good source in spite of its few shortcomings. Just browsing through some of its articles and looking at the related items listed at the end of the articles can make the readers connect the dots and better understand some basic issues. Where the current wave of terrorism and terrorists come from, what models they follow, how they get inspired by the culture of foreign people, and by domestic cult movements and cult figures of the recent past to plan and execute lethal terrorist acts against innocent civilians, fellow workers and fellow students, to act out their personal failures and frustrations and to burn the imprint of terror in the mind of many from the likes of deprived Timothy McVeigh, through the depraved Columbine Goths, to the mentally derailed Cho Seung–Hui at Virginia Tech. The open and digital access to this encyclopedia makes it an especially worthy ready reference source.