This book, Jihadist Psychopath by Jamie Glazov, is an interesting, original and important account of how Islamist supremacism’s onslaught against the West, including the United States, employs a psychopath’s nefarious and deceptive strategies and tactics to “devour” Western civilization — just as an individual psychopath would hunt and swindle his unsuspecting and naive prey.

As Michael Ledeen writes in the book’s foreword, it is through such a deceptive psychological approach that jihadist militants “have managed to convince their intended victims that the religious/political war [between the Muslim world and the West] is the fault of the West, and that our best strategy is surrender.”

The author, the editor of Frontpage magazine, is well-positioned to analyze these issues, as it reports on how these threats manifest themselves in Western societies.

What are the psychopath’s nefarious methods? Citing Martha Stout, an author of an authoritative book on the psychology of psychopaths, this consists of “playing the pity card to get people to give him what he wants, which, primarily, means getting the[ir targets] to give him complete power over their lives.”

What makes the psychopath so dangerous is that “he never takes responsibility for any of his actions and, most importantly, that he never says he is sorry. He perpetually poses as the unappreciated martyr and displays unending moral indignation about where he was wronged — a charge that comes accompanied by his eternal (and groundless) accusations against the victim.”

The psychopath’s success in shaping and overtaking the worldview of his “enslaved” victims “through, domination, threat, and intimidation,” the author argues, has produced an ineffectual Western approach to countering Islamist terrorism to such an extent that it has led to “our current surrender to a vicious totalitarian enemy” with the “Islamic supremacism’s gains in the terror war a carbon copy of the manner in which the psychopath captures and defeats his prey.”

To explain how the movements that constitute “Islamic supremacism” — which cumulatively embody the psychopathic ‘personality’ — employ the psychopath-victim dynamic to gain the upper hand in weakening the West’s war against Islamist terrorism, the book is divided into three parts.

The chapters in Part I, “The Seduction,” discuss the Islamists’ success in convincing their Western adversaries to “See No Islam, Hear No Islam,” even when the terrorist attackers against them, such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State, are driven by the mission to fulfill the precepts of jihadism to target their apostate adversaries.

In what the author terms the “Jihad Denial matrix,” even when jihadist terrorists “quote their Islamic texts to justify their barbaric actions, it is not because of Islam. The terrorists, we are told, are just a very tiny minority of Muslims who have misunderstood and hijacked their own religion. They are, therefore, not even real Muslims.”

The chapters in Part II, “Dancing With the Jihadist Psychopath,” present the psychopathic methods used by Jihadists to portray themselves as the “eternal victims” of others’ unjust oppression. It is for this reason that jihadists view Western “modernization and creativity as blasphemy” since in Islamic fundamentalism “the individual must sublimate himself into the collective whole, making it impossible for him to find or express himself as an individual.”

This is why religiously fundamentalist Muslims in the West blame “liberalism” and “pluralism” as factors contributing to their alienation in such societies since they are ‘made’ to feel uncomfortable practicing their traditional and repressive religiously courts-dominated and anti-women’s equality cultures in such ‘open’ societies.

The chapters in Part III, “The Devouring,” discuss how the jihadist psychopaths succeed in controlling their Western adversaries through three levels of attack:

Islamic jihad (terrorist attacks by al Qaeda and the Islamic State), stealth jihad (non-violent tactics of deceit and brainwashing, such as accusing their critics of engaging in Islamophobia, preventing their critics from speaking in public places, and accusing critics of deceptive so-called “asylum seeking refugees” from conflict countries such as Syria as being anti-Muslim racists), and international institutional jihad (when Muslim countries utilize international organizations, such as the United Nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, to express their agendas by pushing to criminalize “truth-telling” about Islam through punishable international penal laws).

In the conclusion, the author wisely recommends that to defeat and dismantle the tactics and “weapons” used by the jihadist psychopath it is necessary to “break our addiction to that pathological perspective — which the Unholy Alliance has forced on us.“

It should be noted that such psychopathic leaders also tend to dominate the full spectrum of religious and political cults and terrorist groups around the world where they exercise their psychopathic control over their followers, so this phenomenon is not limited to Islamist extremists.

By elaborating on the paradigm of psychopath-victim dynamic in the case of jihadi psychopaths, which can be used to explain how this disturbing phenomenon operates in general, this book is an essential guide for understanding the measures required to understand and counter the deceptive takeover methods used by jihadist militants (including the Muslim Brotherhood) in the West, as well as all ideologically extremist-driven terrorism in general and the local communities that support and sustain them.

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Joshua Sinai is a Washington, DC-based consultant on counterterrorism and homeland security issues.

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