This book raises important questions about how free societies in the West can best be defended from the challenge of Islamism. As Henry Kopel demonstrates in this ambitious book, any successful strategy will include empowering genuine Muslim reformers in the battle of ideas.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hoover Institution Research Fellow

Anyone interested to understand the dangers posed to today’s world by the interrelationship between incitement, terrorism, and genocide must read this original and insightful book.

Efraim Karsh, Emeritus Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, King's College London & Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies

In War on Hate, Henry Kopel, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the United States Department of Justice, has synthesized the now large scholarship and U.S. government reports on the Islamist ideological roots of terrorism and mass violence. With the thoroughness of a prosecutor, he builds the case that the global jihad of recent decades in North Africa and the Middle East, and the threats to Israel and other Western democracies stem from a now well documented Islamist ideology in Sunni and Shia forms. Kopel writes that despite the abundant evidence of this reality, parts of the American government’s policy institutions engage in “willful blindness,” euphemisms or even denial of the obvious but inconvenient truth. He advocates that the democracies intensify their public diplomacy and intellectual counter-offensives, and proposes a federal anti-incitement statute. War on Hate is a unique and important blend of scholarship and legal reasoning which deserves wide reading among government officials, policy analysts and engaged citizens.

Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland, College Park

Genocide and mass-killing claimed more lives in the 20th century than war and yet the incitement which catalyzed such slaughter remains largely ignored not only by diplomats but also by human rights groups. No longer. Kopel masterfully takes the reader on a tour through recent history and across the globe to make the case that combating incitement is the missing piece to ensure that 'never again' means just that. War on Hate should be mandatory reading for every diplomat, international correspondent, and human rights advocate.

Michael Rubin, American Enterprise Institute

Henry Kopel destroys a whole bunch of plausible but sloppy explanations for terrorism and genocide, such as assuming that hatred is the result of poverty or colonialism or ‘ancient hatreds that boil over’. They’re not, he argues in this persuasive text... One of the guiding threads of Kopel’s analysis concerns the absence of those opposing narratives, which favours centralized states with strong apparatus of information control. He says that the forms of governance least likely to generate genocidal or terrorist violence are stable, liberal democracies.

University of Oxford - Off the Shelf