Overview

The UN outlawed genocide in 1948, and the United States launched a war on terror in 2001; yet still today, neither genocide nor terrorism shows any sign of abating. This book explains why those efforts have fallen short and identifies policies that can prevent such carnage. The key is getting the causation analysis right. Conventional wisdom emphasizes ancient hatreds, poverty, and the impact of Western colonialism as drivers of mass violence. But far more important is the inciting power of mass, ideological hate propaganda: this is what activates the drive to commit mass atrocities, and creates the multitude of perpetrators needed to conduct a genocide or sustain a terror campaign. A secondary causal factor is illiberal, dualistic political culture: this is the breeding ground for the extremist, “us-vs-them” ideologies that always precipitate episodes of mass hate incitement. A two-tiered policy response naturally follows from this analysis: in the short term, several targeted interventions to curtail outbreaks of such incitement; and in the long term, support for indigenous agents of liberalization in venues most at risk for ideologically-driven violence.

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9781793627629

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In War on Hate, Henry Kopel, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the United States Department of Justice, has synthesized the now large scholarship and U.S. government reports on the Islamist ideological roots of terrorism and mass violence. With the thoroughness of a prosecutor, he builds the case that the global jihad of recent decades in North Africa and the Middle East, and the threats to Israel and other Western democracies stem from a now well documented Islamist ideology in Sunni and Shia forms. Kopel writes that despite the abundant evidence of this reality, parts of the American government's policy institutions engage in willful blindness, euphemisms or even denial of the obvious but inconvenient truth. He advocates that the democracies intensify their public diplomacy and intellectual counter-offensives, and proposes a federal anti-incitement statute. War on Hate is a unique and important blend of scholarship and legal reasoning which deserves wide reading among government officials, policy analysts and engaged citizens. -- Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland, College Park Genocide and mass-killing claimed more lives in the 20th century than war and yet the incitement which catalyzed such slaughter remains largely ignored not only by diplomats but also by human rights groups. No longer. Kopel masterfully takes the reader on a tour through recent history and across the globe to make the case that combating incitement is the missing piece to ensure that 'never again' means just that. War on Hate should be mandatory reading for every diplomat, international correspondent, and human rights advocate. -- Michael Rubin, American Enterprise Institute Henry Kopel destroys a whole bunch of plausible but sloppy explanations for terrorism and genocide, such as assuming that hatred is the result of poverty or colonialism or 'ancient hatreds that boil over'. They're not, he argues in this persuasive text... One of the guiding threads of Kopel's analysis concerns the absence of those opposing narratives, which favours centralized states with strong apparatus of information control. He says that the forms of governance least likely to generate genocidal or terrorist violence are stable, liberal democracies. * University of Oxford - Off the Shelf *

Author Information

Henry Kopel is federal prosecutor in Connecticut with over 30 years’ experience investigating and prosecuting national security matters, domestic terrorism, violent crimes, narcotics trafficking, and white collar crime.

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