Terrorism

Judea Pearl is the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl and author of I am Jewish. Professor Akbar Ahmed teaches Islamic Studies at American University. The two are collaborating on a series of interfaith dialogues across the country and abroad. Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002, while reporting on Islamic extremists. Judea Pearl is a professor at UCLA, and President of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. Akbar S. Ahmed is the author of Islam Under Siege.

Before most Americans had heard of the Taliban, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote a book about them. After the Sept. 11 attacks, it became a best-seller. Rashid's recent reporting for English-language newspapers involves Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Our book critic reviews Terrorist, the new novel by John Updike.

Clark Kent Ervin, former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, earned a reputation for being critical of the department while he was there. He was appointed in January of 2003, but after 18 months was not reappointed. He brings his perspective to the page with the new book Open Target: Where America is Vulnerable to Attack.

Director Paul Weitz's new film, American Dreamz, satirizes American Idol and stars Dennis Quaid as a dimwitted U.S. president who goes on the show in an effort to save his falling approval ratings. Weitz's other films include American Pie and About a Boy.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, forced many Americans to reshape their lives. For New Yorkers whose plans and priorities were cast loose, the shocking losses were followed by a challenge: what to do next. That dilemma is at the heart of Jay McInerney's The Good Life.

A new Showtime cable miniseries tells the story of Muslim terrorists in America. The controversial thriller Sleeper Cell premieres Sunday night.

As a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations, Richard A. Clarke often had to imagine worst-case scenarios. His first novel — a thriller — does just that: set five years in the future, it envisions the United States on the verge of another war in the Middle East.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Icendiary, the debut novel by British writer Chris Cleave. The story is triggered by an al-Qaeda bomb attack on a London soccer match.

Muzammil Siddiqi is chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Islamic legal scholars that interprets Muslim religious law. On July 28, the group issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, condemning all acts of terrorism and religious extremism as fundamentally un-Islamic.

Critic-at-large John Powers says that two current blockbusters, Batman Begins and War of the Worlds, are deeply influenced by America's post-Sept. 11 obsession with terrorism.

Charles Sennott is the London bureau chief for the Boston Globe. He was in London during the Underground and bus bombings on July 7. He discusses British reaction to the events and compares it to the American reaction to Sept. 11, 2001.

McDermott, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times was skeptical of the way the Sept. 11 hijackers were portrayed. So he traveled to 22 countries to research their identities, motives and life circumstances. His new book is Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It.

Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. For his book, Keefe researched the possibility that the United States has a planet-spanning surveillance network, known as Echelon. Keefe is a third-year student at Yale Law School and was a Marshall scholar and a 2003 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

In their new book, Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil they warn of the presence of Hezbollah militants in the United States. Diaz and Newman say the cells could potentially be more dangerous than al Qaeda.

Sidney Jones is the director of the International Crisis Group's South East Asia Project. She has examined separatist conflicts, ethnic conflict, and terrorism in the region, with much of her attention focused on work in Indonesia. We discuss how the Indian Ocean tsunami has affected the already politically unstable Indonesia.

Matt Stone is co-executive producer and co-creator (along with Trey Parker) of the popular satirical animated series South Park. Stone and Parker recently collaborated on Team America, an action film satire featuring a cast of puppets in which a rising Broadway star infiltrates a terrorist network.

Christopher Dickey is Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek.. His new novel, The Sleeper, is a thriller about a former terrorist living the United States who hunts down his former al Qaeda comrades after Sept. 11.

His new book is America the Vulnerable: How our Government is Failing to Protect us From Terrorism. Flynn is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, and served in the White House Military Office during the senior Bush administration. He also was director for global issues on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration.

Langewiesche is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and he is the author of a number of books including Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight. His new book is The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos and Crime. It's about the unregulated world of the open sea where some 40,000 ships travel carrying raw materials and products. Their crews are often poorly trained and poorly paid. The ships are vulnerable to accidents, piracy and terrorists.