Penetrating The Terrorist Psyche
Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, PhD is a fellow at the American Center for Democracy. She is a graduate of the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. She holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Minnesota which focused on Al Andalus including Old Spanish in Arabic script. Dr. Kobrin was contacted after 9/11 by the U.S. Army concerning the relationship between the devalued female in Arab-Muslim culture and the suicide attack. Her work has been used extensively by the military. She published her first book The Banality of Suicide Terrorism in 2010 which has also been translated into Hebrew. Dr. Kobrin is a graduate of the Human Terrain Program, Leavenworth Kansas. She has lectured military and law enforcement in the U.S., Madrid, Sri Lanka, Israel and NATO. She conducted prison interviews in Minneapolis in 2005-2006 and predicted at Rand Santa Monica that there would be problems coming from the Somali community due to failure to integrate into American society. The first American Somali suicide bomber detonated in Puntland five months later. She immigrated to Israel in 2010 where she lives with her partner, Professor Yitzhak Reiter, Israel’s leading authority on the Arab minority. She has six grandchildren.