FEATURED INDIVIDUALS

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God’s Jewish Warriors

Morris Amitay is the former executive director of AIPAC and the director of Washington PAC, a pro-Israel political action committee, which he founded in 1981. He is the chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and leads its annual visit to Israel of retired U.S. generals and admirals for exchanges with Israel’s top military and political leaders. 

Karen Armstrong is a religious historian and author of The Battle for God.

Sondra Oster Baras, an American-born Israeli, helps run Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, an organization that raises money from pro-Israel Christians around the world to support settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Yakov Barnea is a veteran of the 1967 Six-Day War. He helped capture the Old City and Temple Mount. A secular Israeli, he thinks religion should stay in the synagogue and not dominate politics, and he does not believe in the coming of the messiah.

President Jimmy Carter brokered the historic 1979 peace talks between Israel and Egypt.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Among other works, he is the author of Peace, not Apartheid, a book critical of Israel’s occupation of land captured during the 1967 Six-Day War.

Gary Cristofaro is the pastor at the First Assembly Church of God in Melbourne, Fla. The central focus of his ministry is support for Israel. His worship services on Friday night, the Jewish Sabbath, incorporate Jewish rituals and Hebrew prayers. The congregation also gives financial support to Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Shlomi Dvir is a religious extremist and a resident of the Bat Ayin settlement on the West Bank. He was convicted and sent to prison for his role in a plot to bomb a Palestinian girls’ school.

Dror Etkes is a left-wing Israeli activist and the director of Peace Now’s anti-settlement project. 

Yehuda Etzion helped establish the West Bank settlement of Ofrah. He was also a leader of a group known as the Jewish Underground, which detonated bombs in the cars of Palestinian mayors on the West Bank. Some members of the terror group also plotted to use stolen military explosives to destroy the Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third holiest site.

Carmi Gillon is a former chief of Israel’s secretive internal security agency, Shin Bet.

Gershom Gorenberg is an American-born Israeli journalist. He is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the TempleMount.

David Ha’Ivri is an American-born Israeli and a student of the extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane.

Dov Hikind is a New York state assemblyman representing a largely Hasidic community in Brooklyn. He also has a strong connection to Israel and has led several protests and charities that support Jewish people living in the settlements. 

Shani Hikindis the executive director of Ateret Cohanim, The Jewish Reclamation Project, an organization that raises money to support a Yeshiva in the Old City. The group also helps to buy property in Palestinian neighborhoods for Jewish families.

Sheikh Muhammad Hussein is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Islam’s highest-ranking cleric in the Holy Land.

Meir Lapid is a West Bank settler whose father and brother were murdered in a drive-by shooting near Hebron.  

Bruce Lawrence is a professor of religion at Duke University and the author of Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age.

Idit Levinger is a resident of Amona, an unauthorized hilltop outpost on the West Bank. She helped organize protests over the demolition of illegally built homes.

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, who co-authored the hotly debated essay “The Lobby.” It argues that the pro-Israel lobby’s enormous influence leads to foreign policy that is not in America’s best interest.

Theodor Meron is a leading authority on international humanitarian law, human rights and international criminal law. As a legal advisor to the Israeli government in 1967, he wrote a top secret memo explaining why, in his view, civilian settlements in the occupied territory would violate international law.

Yarden Morag is a religious extremist and a resident of the Bat Ayin settlement on the West Bank. He was convicted and sent to prison for his role in a plot to bomb a Palestinian girls’ school.

Mushin Natsheh is a Palestinian businessman and peace activist who owns a home in a Jerusalem refugee camp that has been threatened with demolition. Every day for a year, he chained himself to the roof of his house. Three courts ruled in his favor, stopping the demolition, but his case is now pending in the Israeli Supreme Court. 

Shimon Peres is a Nobel Peace Prize winner and, currently, the president of Israel. Peres is one of the country’s longest-serving leaders, and he believes Israel’s security needs justified the building of settlements after the 1967 war.

Hanan Porat was an Israeli soldier in the 1967 Six-Day War and helped capture the Old City and the Temple Mount. In the early 1970’s he co-founded Gush Emunim (“The Bloc of the Faithful”), the movement that turbo-charged Zionism with the message that settling the occupied territories was part of God’s plan for Jewish redemption and the coming of the messiah.

Noa Rothman is the granddaughter of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a religious extremist in 1995.

Danny Seideman, an American-born Israeli, is a Jewish human rights lawyer who advocates for Palestinian property rights. He has also participated in peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

Bassam Shakaa was the mayor of the West Bank Palestinian city of Nablus and one of the Jewish Underground’s most prominent targets. He lost his legs because of a car bomb.  

Tzipi Shissel is a resident of the West Bank settlement of Hebron. Her father, Rabbi Shlomo Ra'anan, was stabbed to death in his home in the West Bank settlement of Hebron. She is nonetheless determined to remain in Hebron with her husband and ten children because she believes Jews should have permanent control of the land Israel captured from the Arabs in 1967.

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God’s Muslim Warriors

Geneive Abdo is the author of several books, including Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11, the culmination of her spending the last few years visiting Muslim communities within the United States.

Davoud Abdolhadi fought and was wounded in the Iran-Iraq war as a teenager.

Mohammed Mahdi Akef is the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, became a Dutch citizen and, in 2003, was elected to the Dutch parliament. She is outspoken about the treatment of Muslim women and caused heated debate within the Muslim community because of her short film, Submission, in which verses of the Koran are projected onto the bodies of naked women. Hirsi Ali now lives in the United States and works for the American Enterprise Institute.

Yahya Alimirzai is a bus driver in Iran who directs a passion play about the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Mohammed and the holiest figure in the Shiite branch of Islam.   

Karen Armstrong is a former nun who is now a religious historian and the author of books including The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism.

Malika el Aroud is a strong supporter of Osama bin Laden and his cause. She is the widow of an al Qaeda suicide bomber who bin Laden chose for an 'important' mission.

Mahfouz Azzam is the uncle of Ayaman al Zawahari, the second-ranking leader in al Qaeda. He was also a student of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian whose works laid the foundation for the modern jihad movement.

Khalid Batarfi was friends with Osama bin Laden as a teenager and was his neighbor in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Rafat Bayat is a member of the Iranian parliament. She tried to run for the office of president of Iran, but clerics blocked her candidacy.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s terrorism analyst and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know. In 1997, he was a CNN producer for Osama bin Laden’s first-ever TV interview with CNN.

Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer and Iran’s first female judge. After the revolution, she was removed from the bench by the ayatollahs. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work for women’s rights.

Massoumeh Ebtekar was the spokesperson for the students who stormed the American embassy in Iran and took hostages in 1979. She later became Iran’s first female vice president.

Prince Turki al Faisal is the former head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, and the former Saudi ambassador to the United States. In the mid-1980s, he was responsible for funneling Saudi funds to the mujahideen in Afghanistan. 

Amir Fakhar is one of the hundreds of thousands of young Iranians who volunteered to be martyrs during the Iran-Iraq War. He was 13 when he first went to the front, and both of his brothers were killed during the war.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross was born Jewish before he converted to Islam while in college. In his book, My Year Inside Radical Islam, he describes how he spent a year as a radicalized Muslim before leaving the radical world.

Fawaz Gerges holds the Christian A. Johnson chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and the author of numerous books including Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy.

Shadi Ghadirian is an Iranian photographer whose images contain strong messages about the lives of Iranian women.

Anthony Glees is a British professor who explains how Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist movement banned in most Middle Eastern countries but legal in the United Kingdom, recruits and converts people.

Kamal el-Said Habib was part of a paramilitary group that plotted and carried out the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Though he denies actively taking part in the assassination, he was imprisoned for 10 years and was a part of the first generation of jihadists who wanted Egypt to have an Islamist government.

Jamal Harwood is the leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, an Islamist movement banned in most Middle Eastern countries but legal in the United Kingdom.

Ed Husain is a Muslim and British citizen who recently published a book, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, which traces his road to fanaticism—and why he walked away from it.

Imam Fawaz Jneid heads a mosque in the Hague and has been accused of making radical statements.

Osama Khalek is an entrepreneur, a pilot and the founder of an Egyptian airline who wants the Egyptian government to be based in Islamic Law.

Bruce Lawrence is a religious historian and an author.

Ahmed Marcouch is a Muslim and a member of Amsterdam’s city council. He worries about how to integrate young, devout Muslims into liberal Dutch society and has started a program in his district to try and prevent the radicalization of young Muslims.

Taji Mustafa is a spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist movement banned in most Middle Eastern countries but legal in the United Kingdom. The group’s goal is a worldwide Muslim caliphate ruled by fundamentalist Islamic law.

Hojatolislam Ali Lari, Abdollah Rezaie, Mohamed Rezaie are Deputy Director, Director of Culture and Arts and Magazine editor, respectively, at the Bright Future Institute in Qom, Iran that studies the Hidden Imam and which Christiane visited.

Peter Rodman is a former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration.

Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei is one of the more liberal ayatollahs in Iran and was a protégé of Ayatollah Khomeini. In the 1980s, Saanei served on the first Council of Guardians in Iran and later as Prosecutor General. 

Rehan Seyam is an American-born Muslim who lives in New Jersey and is part of a new generation of Muslim-Americans who are embracing their faith.

Yousef Swatat’s family members are Palestinians living in the West Bank. Yousef, along with an accomplice, opened fire at a busy intersection in the Israeli city of Hadera, killing four and wounding dozens before Yousef was shot dead himself. His family talks about their pride in Yousef, saying he became a martyr that day.

Emerson Vermaat is a Dutch lawyer and investigative journalist who has written two books on the Hofstadgroup, a terrorist cell in the Netherlands.

Geert Wilders is a member of the Dutch parliament who proposed a ban on women wearing burqas in the Netherlands because he says that Islam is a violent religion and a threat to the west. He is under 24-hour protection because of threats on his life.

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God’s Christian Warriors

Greg Boyd is the pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn. He believes that politics and religion should not mix. 

President Jimmy Carter has been an outspoken critic of what he sees as the dangerous growth of religious fundamentalism in the world today. 

Mandy and Megan Chapman are twins and students at Liberty University, a Christian school in Lynchburg, Va., founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. 

Richard Cizik is Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals. He is an environmental activist and believes saving the planet needs to be as important an issue for evangelicals as abortion, same sex marriage and prayer in schools.
       
The Rev. Jerry Falwell was the chancellor and founder of Liberty University and the co-founder of the Moral Majority. His interview with Christiane Amanpour was conducted the week before his death and is his last television interview. 

John Green is a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and he also serves as the director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Akron.

John Hagee is the senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. He is a Christian Zionist, dedicated to protecting and defending Israel at all costs.

Russell Johnson is the senior pastor of Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster, Ohio. He encourages Christians to vote their religious values, and in 2004, was active in supporting an amendment that defined marriage as between one man and one woman. 

Ron Luce is the founder of Teen Mania Ministries. His organization holds events across the United States to encourage young people to turn towards Christ and away from what he describes as a poisonous secular culture.

Jennifer and Michael Nevarr are parents who are home schooling their five children to make sure they are educated from a Christian world view. 

Mindy Peterson is an intern with Teen Mania Ministries, an organization that encourages young people to turn away from what they see as a morally bankrupt secular culture and towards a Christian lifestyle. 
           
Ralph Reed is the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, a grass roots political organization that made Christian conservatives a political force in the United States. 

Rick Scarborough is a pastor and the founder of Vision America. His mission is to create an army of “Patriot Pastors” and churchgoers, who will vote their values and change secular laws to reflect a Biblical morality.

Mathew Staver is the dean of the Liberty University School of Law, which has a classroom set up to replicate the Supreme Court of the United States. He is teaching a generation of lawyers to challenge legislatures and courts to reflect Christian values. 

Danille Turissini is a grass-roots activist from Washington State for the organization Positive Christian Agenda, which presents legislation that reflects Christian values. 

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