Undoubtedly timely and full of fascinating detail, Sword of Islam is a thorough, well-researched, and revealing account of global Islamic terrorism. A military historian, John F. Murphy Jr. traces the intricate interconnections among various terrorist cells, including Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and its relationship with the Taliban of Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Islamic Moro extremists in the Philippines, obscure Algerian terrorist groups, and other sympathetic underworld organizations in Lebanon, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and even South America. He also puts recent terrorist attacks in historical context by discussing such key events as the rise of Arab nationalism following Israel's victory in the 1948 war, the Black September killings of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, the 1976 rescue at Entebbe by Israeli commandos of hostages abducted by German terrorists, the terrorist plots of the infamous "Carlos the Jackal," the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the impact of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Mujahideen resistance of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the same year.

This book supplies the answer to the question that has been on the minds of all Americans since September 11: Why do they hate us? Murphy makes it clear that as the chief backer of Israel the United States is seen by extremists as the evil power behind the hated "Zionist enemy." But he also emphasizes that in the final analysis we are the only country with the power to bring these attacks to a halt.