Loretta Napoleoni, terrorism expert and author of Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks and Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation,
will present a lecture titled "Who is Financing Global Terror
Networks?" on Monday, Nov. 7, at 8 p.m., in the Hamilton College
Chapel. This event is free and open to the public.
Napoleoni,
born and raised in Rome, was a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins
University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and
a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics. She is a journalist
and has worked as a foreign correspondent for several Italian financial
papers. In addition to Terror, Incorporated, she has written
novels, guide books in Italian and translated and edited books on
terrorism. She was among the few people to interview the Red Brigades
in Italy after three decades of silence; this research became the topic
of her Ph.D.
In Terror, Incorporated, Napoleoni
traces 50 years of Western economic and political dominance in
developing Muslim countries - backing repressive, corrupt regimes,
fighting the Cold War by Proxy and blocking the legitimate economic
ascendancy of millions. "As in the Crusades," in which Napoleoni finds
many modern parallels, "religion is simply a recruitment tool; the real
driving force is economics."
New York Times' reviewer Alan Cowell describes Terror, Incorporated:
"What this work does achieve is a fascinating and incisive cataloguing
of the known economic activities of organizations that, whether
terrorist or not, have as their aim the transformation of the existing
order in the Middle East, the broader Muslim world and, ultimately, the
United States." The Wall Street Journal added, "Economist
Loretta Napoleoni comes up with a startling conclusion that the 'New
Economy of Terror' is a fast growing international economic system,
with a turnover of about $1.5 trillion, twice the GDP of the United
Kingdom."
Napoleoni's most recent book, Insurgent Iraq,
traces the story of the infamous new face of al Zarqawi and his
involvement in the region as the supposed link between Saddam Hussein
and Al Qaeda. Dr. Yoram Kahati, Research Fellow at The International
Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center
in Herzliya, Israel, commented, "Dr. Napoleoni's portrayal of
al-Zarqawi's transformation, from a Jordanian petty criminal into
probably today's most active Sunni-Islamic terrorist leader in Iraq, is
a must read."
This event is sponsored by the Globalization
Sophomore Seminars and the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center and is
free and open to the public.
-- by Molly Kane '09
