https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270741/isis-begins-novel-iraq-war-jamie-glazov
Frontpage’s guest today is Ken Timmerman, author of several New York Times best-sellers and a frequent contributor to Frontpage. His new book is ISIS BEGINS, a novel of the Iraq War.
FP: Ken Timmerman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Timmerman: Thanks for having me, Jamie. It’s always a pleasure.
FP: Let’s begin with a quick glance at some of your books: Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Saddam, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, and your two books on Benghazi, Dark Forces, and Deception.
So here’s the first question: what compels an investigative reporter to write a novel, and especially one about persecuted Christians?
Timmerman: Great question, Jamie. Thank you.
I started going on reporting and mission trips to northern Iraq in 2007, and gathered so much material that I thought I should write a book about what my sources were calling the coming “religiocide” of Iraqi Christians. Already then, in 2007, 2008, Christians were leaving Iraq in huge numbers. Jihadi Muslim groups were bombing their churches, murdering their bishops. They kidnapped ordinary Christians, holding them for ransom, and then murdered them when their families couldn’t produce the exorbitant payments they demanded. I was thinking to call such a book, “Blood of the Iraqi Martyrs.” But my agent at the time couldn’t get a single major publisher interested. Not one.
The publishing world just didn’t want to hear about Christian persecution. Even before Obama, when the subject literally became taboo, the notion that Christians were being murdered by Muslims was not popular.
So during one of these trips, Father Keith Roderick, an Anglican priest who then worked for Christian Solidarity International, a terrific group, by the way, convinced me that I should recast this body of material as a novel.
Why? So that ordinary Americans could feel and smell and taste what it is like to be a persecuted Christian, chased by Muslims intent on murder. For that is the reality of Iraq – and of so many other places around the world, such as Nigeria, Sudan, or Iran. He felt a novel would a more emotional impact on readers than a non-fiction book would.
FP: And you’re not new to writing novels, right?
Timmerman: Right, I am not. I have had two novels published. I confess: I actually started my career writing fiction, and studied under avante-garde novelist John Hawkes at the Brown University graduate writing seminar in the early 1970s and went to Paris in 1975 with a novel in my suitcase. I eventually started an expat literary magazine, Paris Voices, that was the center of a whole expat literary scene. But that’s a whole other story.