Ruby Sisson Library

"Nicola, Christianne, and Marie are mothers who discovered too late that their sons had been radicalized online and had flown from the West to join the tens of thousands of foreign ISIS fighters in Syria. Too often extremists are portrayed as having sprung from the earth as irredeemable killing machines, but these women underscore the deeper truth that no one is born a terrorist, and they have themselves become activists in preventing violent radicalism....

"The Islamic State has stunned the world with its savagery, destructiveness, and military and recruiting successes. What explains the rise of ISIS and what does it portend for the future of the Middle East? In this book, one of the world's leading authorities on political Islam and jihadism sheds new light on these questions as he provides a unique history of the rise and growth of ISIS. Moving beyond journalistic accounts, Fawaz Gerges provides a...

"When British and American intelligence catch wind of a major Al Qaeda operation in the works, they instantly galvanize - but to do what? They know nothing about it: the what, where, or when. They have no sources in Al Qaeda, and it's impossible to plant someone. Impossible, unless ..." "The Afghan is Izmat Khan, a five-year prisoner at Guantanamo Bay and a former senior commander of the Taliban. The Afghan is also Colonel Mike Martin, a twenty-five-year...

In today's northern Virginia sits an agency bearing the name Technical Operations Support Activity, or TOSA. With two hundred fifty employees and pretending to be something else, it has only one mission: to track, find, and kill those so dangerous to the United States that they are on a short, closely held Kill List. A new name on the list, the Preacher, radicalizes young Muslims abroad to become assassins. One of his victims was the father of an...

"Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East." --Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker. "Robert Baer [was] one of the most talented Middle East case officers of the past twenty years." -Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Atlantic Monthly. In See No Evil, one of the CIA's top field officers of the past quarter century recounts his career running agents in the back alleys of the Middle East. In the process, Robert Baer...

In the End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs -- even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction we cannot expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Most controversially, he...

"John Updike's twenty-second novel tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam." "The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of...

Now with a new chapter! 'Everywhere militants were blowing up Christians, their churches, their shops. They threatened them with kidnapping. They promised to take their children. The message to these 'infidels': You have no place in Iraq. Pay a penalty to stay, leave, or be killed.' Sweeping from Syria into Iraq, Islamic State fighters (ISIS) have been brutalizing and annihilating Christians. How? Why? Where did the terrorists come from, and what...

"For more than one hundred years the West has failed to understand Islam" (U.S. State Department Official, 1992). This quote from the original edition of Riders of the Pale Horse introduces the story of two young Americans, a foreign-service officer and a mission volunteer who cross paths near the Afghanistan border on very different assignments and yet with a common goal: to stop nuclear materials from falling into terrorists' hands. High-stakes...

Examines the growing proliferation of militant Islamic terrorist cells in the United States, revealing how they are able to exploit the civil freedoms of the U.S. to coordinate their activities.