THE PRICE OF FANATICISM

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The sense of American immunity was truly swept away in February 1993, when a group of Muslim conspirators detonated a homemade bomb under New York City's World Trade Center. Four months later, nine Islamists were arrested on charges of conspiring to blow up such landmarks as the U.N. and the Lincoln Tunnel. In both cases, the motivation was essentially religious and without any discernible goal: they were simply attacks on the U.S., the Great Satan, in the name of Allah.

The religious ingredient in violence is a dangerous trend the experts have been watching closely. The Irish Republican Army and the Palestine Liberation Organization might have a surface religious orientation, but they and their objectives are political. Some analysts designate even relatively violent Islamic groups "mainstream'' terrorists. The Trade Center bombers are in a different category. They do not have clearly visible political motives and seem to have come together rather casually, outside a formal organization, only to inflict punishment on Americans, the infidel enemies of their religion.

In 1968, the first year in which international terrorism seized the headlines, of the eight known groups, all were political, without religious overtones. In 1980, a year after Islamic radicals overthrew the Shah of Iran, overtly religious terrorist groups made their appearance. Of the 48 international groups active in 1992, almost a quarter were religiously motivated. Shi'ite groups, though they commit less than 10% of the attacks worldwide, account for 30% of all the killings.

"Whenever religion is involved, terrorists kill more people,'' says Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at Scotland's University of St. Andrews. Last December a group of Algerian Islamists hijacked an Air France Airbus A300, which they planned to blow up over the center of Paris solely to kill as many people as possible. They would almost certainly have done so if they had not been killed on the ground in Marseilles.

Small, charismatic cults are adopting more violent methods as well. These extremist sects appeal to many people in an antispiritual age because they combine their empowering theology with a warm, supportive environment, at least at first. Those who join become part of a close-knit body of believers who are convinced they understand the meaning of history and what the future holds. That was true of David Koresh's Branch Davidians, and it applies to certain extremist Christian white-supremacist groups bent on "purifying'' the U.S.

But once the recruits are in the cult's grip, they encounter a darker side, even if they do not recognize it. Their charismatic leader preaches that they are surrounded by enemies, that nonbelievers are out to crush them and that God commands vengeance. In some sects they are told to commit violent acts, says Hoffman, "because the only way they can hasten redemption or achieve salvation is to eliminate the nonbelievers.''