I'm old enough to remember the terror that gripped America following the 9/11 attacks. It seemed like a foregone conclusion that the gravest threat to national security was always going to come in the form of bad actors from other countries. Over the next twenty years, I watched the most tangible threat shift to home grown extremists, a mob of whom launched a successful attack on the Capitol, only a few miles from my house in Washington DC. Rita Katz describes the domestic threat in detail, offering a stark warning for the future.

A look into the digital age of neo-terrorism and how anyone can become drawn to terrifying ideology through the Internet.

The year 2022 has given us a wealth of resources with which to better understand the source and scope of these perilous times. Amongst the most important of them is Saints and Soldiers by Rita Katz. It's what I like to call a "receipts book", a paper-trail that well documents the mechanisms of this web of terrorism and extremism we find ourselves currently caught in. The most well read among us on the topic will have plenty to learn in reading this book. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in how internet has become such a valuable resource for terrorism in all it's forms.

Saints and Soldiers is by far the scariest and most necessary book I have read in a long time.
It needs to be read by everyone in America and perhaps the world.

When I received word that I had been granted a copy of “Saints and Soldiers”, I was immediately intrigued. Considering myself a fairly well-informed person regarding European politics and underground groups, including those who not only border to terrorism but should be emphatically called exactly that, thinking of such neo-fascist groups in the US I drew basically a blank space. Combining to gather basic knowledge about such structures with the topic of how the modern messengers, apps and boards may have changed the different processes in such groups raised my curiosity. Going into this book I had only one fear: often authors targeting such topics surrounding current technology and the shady use of it tend to demonize the tool instead of the user. Rita Katz did no such thing.
Instead, she focused on first giving the reader a broad overview on different boards, entities, and groups, on attackers whose names are known to probably every single reader – but she also gives enough background information to construct a bigger picture than the individual, seemingly not connected attacks. For me, personally, knowing of most of the terrorist attacks, it felt like a web of interconnected acts of terror that link to each other, are inspired, and even triggered by each other, unravelling in front of me. Ms Katz also introduces the different means of communication with even more diverse user groups and intentions, as well as convictions, to deliver a rough overview over the whole topic.
She then goes on to add a new layer in every progressing chapter: How Jihad works through a white supremacist lens, how a single post turned out to be the new battle cry for a completely different generation of far-right attackers (“Screw your optics”), the accelerationist motif, how extremist groups recruit and connect, which media they use and what memes have to do with it all. Furthermore, she shines a light on how a global pandemic changed the neo-fascist movements, making it murkier and even more obscure than before with the addition of QAnon-conspiracists and a PotUS who ultimately gave the go-ahead for the events that shocked not only a nation, but the whole world when the US Capitol was taken by the exact group of people that probably shared less values than they believed in on January 6.
Ms Katz shows the reader all of this, the interconnections, the bizarreness in claiming attacks for the own cause, provoking attacks by the counterpart to strengthen the own support and recruiting new people and so much more, but she also highlights the incomprehensible double standard when it comes with dealing those two sides of terror: the shunning, exclusion and condemnation of any means of communication for groups associated with Jihad/Al-Quaeda/ISIS while letting the far-right terrorists roam freely, take on their planning and produce an outcry about free speech if their ability to outright coordinate terroristic acts in plain sight is impeded.
The author highlights, offers insight and criticises, all the while underlining her claims with screenshots, memes and media taken directly from those she is talking about. This is a very vivid way to take the reader on this disturbing journey through parts of the Internet, where so much evil grows seemingly uninterrupted.
In theory I would advise everyone to read this book, because in my opinion it is important to know about these things. In general I would say however anyone with a slight interest in how any of the attacks are linked, which role social media plays and what else there is to discover in terms of the extremists’ use of the Internet will find a heavily disturbing, but very intriguing and well-developed read in “Saints and Soldiers: Inside Internet-Age Terrorism, from Syria to the Capitol Siege.”

Thank you, Ms Katz, and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book!

Brilliant, brutal, and enlightening! “Saints and Soldiers” is written by the phenomenal Rita Katz. She sets out, in her own words, to “… offer a diagnosis: something to help governments, researchers, the tech sector, and the general public better understand the nature of internet-age terrorism so that they could better fight it.” and she achieves this and then some. Rita has written a book I couldn’t put down.

Rita’s life story perfectly places her to do the work she does and to write this book. no one can doubt her understanding and experience in the subject but her ability to write such engaging prose is impressive. The stories are brutal but considering the topic, it is quite understandable. she isn’t looking to shock but illustrate.

I gleaned both contextual understanding and technical know-how. Below are two insights that particularly resonated.

“I’ve learned in my counterterrorism work that where there is enough rhetorical upheaval, there will eventually be real-life action.”

“Saints and Soldiers by Rita Katz
“Yet as the world’s fight against jihadi terrorists’ online infrastructures have shown, it was never so much any government making progress as it was the private sector. It took many nudges from government agencies and the general public, but social media and ICT companies eventually came together to build a massive digital wall between ISIS and the people they wish to recruit or intimidate. What the world got from all of this was a wealth of tested and proven strategies that we have sadly not seen fully adapted and implemented against far-right extremism. That the tech sector holds so much power in fighting far-right extremism should at this point be expected, because it speaks to the very nature of such actors. They are products of the environments that tech companies have built, thus making those very companies the best-equipped (and most responsible) to counter them.”

“Saints and Soldiers by Rita Katz
This book is one that will remain in my mind for a long while. The author is one I will follow and look to read again. It’s a five out of five and highly recommended.

I received a complimentary copy of the book from Columbia University Press through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Though I've dedicated quite some time to consuming researched content from experts in the field on the Alt-Right and QAnon in the past few years, I have somehow not come across Katz's work previously. The amount of depth and breadth to her work with SITE is staggering. It is oxymoronically shocking and unsurprising that there was so much information available about the far right movement in the United States long before it came to a boiling point. Saints and Soldiers does an excellent job tracing the origins of this movement via online forums and groups in detail, but not in a way that became overly burdensome. Because Ms. Katz has a long history in documenting extremist islamic groups, her particular insight into how the advent of social media and the internet has changed the ways in which we need to understand terrorism is unique. Additionally, it was interesting to see how the actions of ISIS in particular could be seen to interact with responses from far-right individuals and the rise in support for those groups. And, of course, it's always mind blowing to see cut and dry examples of how one group can be deemed terrorists and (eventually) responded to accordingly, while others are not pursued in the same manner despite perpetrating the same acts.

I wanted to read this book because I am interested in the topic of radical movements flourishing in the Internet’s grey areas and was curious to learn more from an unquestionable expert in this field - but I was pleasantly surprised that it is not a dry academic study. The author combines case studies with her memories and reflections. It is fascinating to read how she dealt with particular crises in real time, learning horrifying details and trying to find what led to such tragic violence, as in a case of Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. She is also pointing out very interesting parallels between jihadist militants and far-right movements in US and Europe.

Trigger warning: there are very graphic descriptions of brutal violence and screenshots with examples of disgusting hate speech in the book, so if you don’t want to expose yourself, don’t read it. I have to admit that I stopped reading it before bedtime, to avoid nightmares…

Thanks to the publisher, Columbia University Press, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

Thank you to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for this ARC. This book focuses on the transition of terrorism from the traditional terrorist idealogue of traveling to another country in person to be radicalized to the transition to online radicalization via websites like Gab, Parler, and the use of these online mediums by both Islamic terror groups and far-right terror groups. This was a hard read. A really hard read in some spots, but it is well worth it, and anyone who wants to understand what happened and the transition made from the traditional views of what terrorism is to the current environment. It also makes a really good point about how one aspect of terror (ISIS) versus the other (alt-right) was handled in the same or similar online spaces and makes suggestions on how to address extremism online. This book is a great, informative read that discusses in frank detail what it looks like having monitored terrorism activity for many years and how it has changed. I do want to reiterate that this book was very hard to get through at times because of the nature of the content that is the subject of this book, but it was well worth it to read and I am glad I took the time to read this book.

You go through life knowing how certain bad things are and you are alive to see some senseless, terrible things committed against humanity. Rita Katz has done such incredible work, so much work that I do not believe has received the acknowledgment her company Site Intelligence in trying to keep the world safe, in ringing and raising the alarm as best can be possibly done to find the root problem, and they have done it. Saints and Soldiers get to the root problem that the world (because it is a universal problem), has in their hands festering in the depths of forums and sites, with no repercussions long enough to amend some laws and some rights.
Saints and Soldiers just prove, with facts and references, based on proper investigations how bad things really are, and how compromised humanity has become. It cements how bad things are, how hopeless it seems, and for there to be any sort of hope I would hope that Rita Katz does not give up the fight, that Site Intelligence continues to do the hard work, and that they can educate certain political members in the office about how to fund or pass bills that will protect us, because it feels like the only people that get protected are the ones that hide behind hostings, published posts, those who spread misinformation, who hide behind freedom of speech that itself attacks more and has rampant effects that go past that right. The information Rita Katz also provides in the book Saints and Soldiers would be very useful to the Jan. 6 Committee and I hope they have made arrangements to share this information.
Everyone must read this book, not only in the U.S. this is a worldwide issue. With certain right-wing affiliations entering governments, other right-wing groups started chapters in countries outside of the U.S. Laws need to come into effect, yesterday, but something can still be done today. Rita Katz has shared the urgency with which we need to react. I hope everyone listens up!

A shocking must-read that will take you to the depths of the far right extremism.

In 'Saints and Soldiers: Inside Internet-Age Terrorism, from Syria to the Capitol Siege,' Rita Katz lays the groundwork for fighting domestic terrorism as deadly as ISIS.

During her many years in the private Search International Terrorist Entities (SITE), Rita Katz, a co-founder and a terrorism analyst, has collected data on the external threats to America like ISIS and other like-minded organizations. The decision to explore far right movements opened up new frightening horizons. As it turned out, the explosive mix of nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis flooded the internet space, using the same techniques as well-known terrorist groups in recruiting and radicalizing new followers. The massacre in New Zealand in Christchurch, an attack on the synagogue in Poway, California, and the Capitol siege are the links in one chain, as the author shows, labeling the movement as terrorism and advising to fight it accordingly.

It's one of those books you can't put down, trembling in anticipation of new findings. The author deploys emotional appeal to instill a sense of urgency: snippets from her private life (with no names attached), questions, and passionate comments on her discoveries. On the one hand, the book would have lost a sufficient amount of its charm without the emotional component, dry facts becoming too dry to digest. On the other hand, some personal reflections felt out of place, especially in the final pages of the last chapter.

I see the book explode the very circles the author wrote about. Rita Katz once again draws a target on her back - and her actions are enormously bold.

I highly recommend ' Saints and Soldiers' to people searching for answers to why mass shootings have become a new norm. The book also provides a fresh, stunning look into the modern dangers of free speech and explains the slowness of governmental reaction.

I received an advance review copy through NetGalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Giving 5 stars for fairness because the content I did read was extremely interesting and well-researched, but the formatting issues (cut off sentences, random spaces, etc) made it impossible to read. I will look for the physical copy of this book.