Posted: 8/17/2008 9:52:00 AM
Author: Reviewed by Hana Levi Julian
Source: This review originally appeared on the Arutz 7 website on Aug. 10, 2008.
New Novel Proposes How to Fight Terrorism
by Hana Levi Julian
(IsraelNN.com) Most people present foreign policy strategies in proposal format and trot them around to political offices or proclaim them from podiums at political forums. First-time author John Errett decided to do it differently, and wrote an action-packed thriller novel instead.
In The OWL and The HAWK: An End To Terrorism, (Free Enterprise Press, June 2008, 342 pages, $19.95), American billionaire businessman Alan Davis confronts his grief over the tragic death of his best friend in an Arab terrorist attack.
The heartbroken, enraged businessman decides to turn the tables on Arab terrorists by forming an undercover agency that uses Arab counterterrorism operatives to assassinate them.
Although the book itself is fiction, says Errett, “it’s based on the Al Qaeda and FBI manuals, both of which I have.” As co-founder and vice president of United Intelligence, Ltd. (UNITEL) Errett worked on an element of the USA/Iranian hostage crisis in 1980 and 1981.
A retired entrepreneur with years of service in the intelligence arena and interaction with the Israeli government, the 77-year-old novelist is no novice to Muslim terrorism.
He is also a Zionist: “Since I was a small child in Bible school, I have believed that the rightful inhabitants of what is now Israel are Jews and Christians,” he says. “But as to who owns the land – it is the Jews, historically and rightfully.”
Most of all, Errett had a passionate commitment to his cause: the book took him less than a year to write. At the age of 70, one could wonder why.
“I was in Florida at the time, where I live, and I had just been through an operation ten hours before, when I saw the attack on the Twin Towers on television,” he relates. “My wife was staying in a hotel across the street. I left the hospital that day, and I shouldn’t have… it was a tough month, a really tough month. I just couldn’t understand it. The attacks on our embassies, the Cole disaster, the Beirut attacks… I was born in New York City, I was raised in New York City and I came from a home on 48th Street and 2nd Avenue. This felt like a personal attack on me,” he explains.
“I was much too old to get into uniform and do anything about it,” he adds with some sadness. The book, he adds, was his way of “doing something about it.”
The “something about it” is what Errett has called the Privilege of Passage Plan (P.O.P. Plan), a proposal to transfer financial responsibility for terrorist acts from the victims and affected nations to the country that issued the perpetrators’ passports. It also forces all participating passport-issuing nations to more closely scrutinize their citizens’ applications. He adds that if there had been a P.O.P. plan in place, and Saudi Arabia had not been a participating nation, the hijackers would not have been allowed entry to America.
Errett believes this would have prevented the 9/11 attack. Had Saudi Arabia been a participating nation, it would have been forced to pay $150 billion in damages, and perhaps would have been more motivated to prevent more terrorism in future, he explains.
Although the writing is sluggish at the beginning, and hampered by periodic stomping on soapboxes by the main characters, it still is an engaging read, with a lot of action and the requisite happy ending.
It would probably make an excellent movie.
