By the early years of the 2000 decade, Americans as well as others in the West had become all-too-familiar with Islamist terrorism. The attacks of September 11, 2001, took the lives of nearly three thousand Americans who were killed when airliners hijacked by terrorists slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda took responsibility for the attack. (Al-Qaeda is an Arabic word meaning "the base.") In fact, by early 2018, the US State Department identified no fewer than fifty separate organizations as Islamist terrorist groups. Certainly, these groups vary in size but their missions are strikingly similar: To bring down national governments and install in their places theocracies that would govern under the edicts of fundamentalist Islamic law-in other words, following to the letter laws first written by Islamic scholars more than 1,400 years ago. To achieve this goal, their members are willing to resort to murdering innocent civilians.
