Bruce Hoffman

If Steve Cole says that it was sort of like there's less to that than meets the eye, I believe Steve.

who's been a longtime friend and colleague and is a very good reporter.

The other element of this is not simply the alleged assassination attempt against George H.W., but there were people in the George W. Bush White House who were annoyed that we hadn't gone to Baghdad when we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait.

It turned out that that was very good judgment, that we didn't rush to Baghdad in 1991 and overthrow Saddam because we know that ultimately the American invasion of 2003 produced an insurgency, which then turned into a civil war and 200,000 Iraqi civilians died and 4,500 American service members died.

This is my swan song.

And I'm 63, and instead of when I'm much older or get hit by a bus or whatever, it's all organized.

Why not hand it over to Georgetown? So I called my good friend, Bruce Hoffman, who's the dean of terrorism studies in the world, who teaches at Georgetown.

He put me in touch with the library.

Today we're going to talk about the attempted hijacking of Fly Dubai Flight 1073.

And the question everyone is asking, was this an al-Qaeda operation or something new? On September 30, a Fly Dubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was about two hours into its journey, with 174 people on board, when the plane suddenly dropped more than 17,000 feet in about two minutes.

Inside the cockpit, the co-pilot, a 29-year-old Omani national named Hammam al-Hammami, attacked the captain with the plane's emergency crash axe and tried to take control of the aircraft.

Crew members and passengers were able to overpower him.

And when you close one loophole or vulnerability and terrorists are very good and very sophisticated at adapting to their new environment and finding other ways.

And I feel like there's just this new chapter we are about to step into in terms of how terrorism works can be pursued, how it can spread.

And to break this down, we have two amazing guests, both doctors, I would add, Dr. Bruce Hoffman and Dr. Sarah Harmoosh, who is a friend of the pod already.

Bruce has studied terrorism for more than four decades and is one of the world's leading experts on Al-Qaeda.

Jacob serves on the editorial boards for the academic journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and he holds an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown and an MA Honors in International Relations and Modern History from the University of St. Andrews.

Together with Bruce Hoffman, he is the author of God, Guns, and Sedition, Far-Right Terrorism in America, published in 2024 by Columbia University Press, and this book was the recipient of the Aire Neave Book Prize, and that's the book that we're going to be talking about today.

So, Jacob, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Chris.

In August, we suffered our attack in the United States, and it happened in El Paso targeting Latino shoppers at a Walmart.

23 people were killed.

That September is when Bruce Hoffman and I started working together at an organization called the Council on Foreign Relations, and six months later, COVID struck.

And certainly in the U.S. context, we started to just be bombarded by far-right, particularly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and it felt like, you know, the far-right white supremacy was in this sort of relentless march upward.

But they, they were either captured, killed, or they escaped to Iran or Pakistan.

But, you know, then there was also the kind of Sageman, Mark Sageman, Bruce Hoffman debate that began to develop, and I, you know, I, I-- Sageman saying, "Well, this is-- these groups are over," um, Bruce Hoffman, our colleague and friend at, at Georgetown saying, uh, you know, that actually the Al-Qaeda retains some, you know, it's, it's not out of business, and organizations by definition can do more than isolated individuals who may be radicalized by what they read on the internet.

And co- neither of them, of course, was wrong.

But Sageman was wrong about the, the sort of the collapse of Al-Qaeda because, you know, the seven seven attacks were in July seventh two thousand and five were directed by Al-Qaeda.