November 7, 2001

When the U.S. declared war on global terrorism after September 11, Osama bin Laden “must have had a sense of relief when America came attacking” in Afghanistan a month later, says the author of a suddenly popular book on the rise of religious violence. For a long time, bin Laden and his al-Qaeda followers had been trying “to take the Muslim world by the shoulders and say, ‘This is war,’” but it took U.S.

Aurora Solis is typical of the people involved in faith-based organizing. Solis, a Mexican immigrant who grew up in a low-income home, works in a staff position at a high school in San Jose, California. She has been a U.S. citizen for only four years. But she was recruited by her pastor to serve on the parish “local organizing committee” and bring together parishioners and others living in the church’s neighborhood. She became a leader in neighborhood struggles and by 1997 was president of People Acting in Community Together (PACT).

In the name of the “war on drugs” much of Colombia is being subjected to terror in the form of massacres, assassinations, rapes and the spraying of poison from airplanes. When in August 2000 Congress approved President Bill Clinton’s request for $1.3 billion to implement “Plan Colombia,” the faith-based organization Witness for Peace decided to send a delegation of 100 people to see for themselves what was happening there, and I signed on. We feared that U.S.