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| The Secret Servant |
Another long awaited sequel came out this summer: The Secret Servant, by Daniel Silva. This series follows part of the career of art restorer-Israeli assassin, Gabriel Allon, and is another book I recommend that you start at the beginning. There are two sort of trilogies in this series. Books 1 and 5 to the most recent deal with fighting Islamist terrorists. Books 2-4 are about what Silva called “the unfinished business of the Holocaust.”
The Secret Servant finds Gabriel again fighting Islamist terrorist seek to attack Israel and the United States. And, truth to tell, I find these books harder to read than the Holocaust novels. Maybe it’s because the Holocaust ended so many years ago and we’re currently engaged in fighting terrorism. More likely, though, it’s the way the terrorists are portrayed in the novels. While Silva gives a couple of sentences to saying that not all Muslims are terrorists, he spends an awful lot of time showing how ruthless, bloodthirsty, and uncompromising Islamists are. I’m not going to argue with anyone. I know there are groups in the Islamic world that want to kill Americans and Jews, and impose sharia on significant portions of the world. But I keep finding myself asking, where did all this hate come from?
I’ve been thinking about this question on and off in the week since I read this book and every time I find something to point to as a root cause, I think of something that happened earlier. It’s an endless cycle of violence all the way back to the Palestinian Mandate and there’s no end in site. Silva is very good about pointing out that the current cycle of violence is actually breeding a more violent generation of terrorists. And thoughts like this make me despair of there ever being peace, because it seems like there’s no way to make it stop.