Osama Bin Laden,
Terrorism,
And The Great Crusade
Against America
Holy War Goes Global
In 1998 Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa, a religious decree. It said that killing Americans-- "civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim…in any country." Osama's disciples have heard his words and obeyed.
" 'Humanist' belief…sees destroying the infidel countries as a tragedy…I would like to stress that annihilating the infidels is an inarguable fact…. The elements of the collapse of Western civilization are proliferating...In spite of all the characteristics of power at their command, these infidel states are no more than a handful of creatures on the speck of dust called Planet Earth....Allah told us of the certainty of the annihilation of the infidels...by means of the Muslim group, which would, in accordance with the Islamic commandment...torture them...The question now on the agenda is, how is the torture Allah wants done at our hands to be carried out?" Seif Al-Din Al-Ansari in Al Qaeda's online magazine Al-Ansar
"Allah will torture them, with your hands, he will torture them. He will deceive them and he will give you victory."
An unidentified Shaykh conversing with Osama bin Ladin in a tape given by al-Qaeda to - Al-Jazeera TV in mid-November, 2001
...Here's how the rain of brimstone forecast looked at the turn of the 21st century. Iran, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Sudan were already in Islamic Fundamentalist hands. Though the fact had gone largely unpublicized in the West, by the end of the 1990s the Moro Islamic Liberation Front had established what it called The Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao on the second largest island of the largely Catholic Philippines, had appointed its own governor, Nur Misuari, and was fighting to gain even more territory.** Afghanistan's Taleban had stripped women of their jobs and rights, required that they cower in their homes wrapped in black with their windows curtained and painted over, wear no shoes a man could hear, and possess no reading material outside of pamphlets promoting official religious views. Ladies of learning and skill who transgressed were beaten with rifle butts in the streets. The Taleban's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Suppression of Vice--modeled on Saudi Arabia's religious police--was known for its stonings, its amputations, its hangings from mobile cranes so a body could be paraded high above a city's roofs, its deaths-by-crushing-under-a-wall, and a long list of other "divinely-ordered" atrocities. Citizens deemed guilty of perjury had their tongues cut out. Even men were allowed an education in only one subject: the Taleban version of Koran.
Using the slogan "film and music leads to moral corruption," the Taleban Ministry of the Fostering of Virtue ordered that Afghanistan's citizens destroy their televisions, VCRs, satellite dishes, and other devices of depravity. Meanwhile, Taleban troops pursued a war of extermination against heretics, specifically the Hazara Shiites in their northern territories. The slaughtered were victims of Allah's order to eliminate unholiness. Human Rights organizations reporting on this murder of women and children saw it differently--they called it simple genocide.
Said one Taliban secret police commander, "I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible
that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests
and if the person survives he will never again have a night's sleep."
All predictions were that Pakistan's 130 million people (more than the population of England and France combined) would be the next to experience fumigation á la Taleban. Pakistan's new leader, it was said, would be someone like the bomber of U.S. embassies and financier of worldwide Holy War Osama Bin Laden--the man who had issued this simple order about Americans: "kill them wherever they are." Money had reportedly been sent from Saudi Arabia to finance Pakistan's Fundamentalist coup. Its probable source was none other than Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who, according to British reporter Robert Fisk, was turning Saudi Arabia, the allegedly "moderate" American ally, "into an anti-American nation in front of our eyes. Of course," added Fisk, "we're not told about that." Nor were we told that Saudi Arabia had long been yet another Fundamentalist theocracy.
Meanwhile, the groups who would purge Pakistan of its sinners were hardening their homicidal skills through bloodbaths in the Punjab, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, and East Africa, where they chanted "Death to America" and "Death to Democracy." Between guerilla raids, these holy warriors headed out to spray graffiti slogans on the town walls in their training camps' vicinity: "democracy leads to secularism" and "Jihad [holy war] leads to dominance of Islam." North of Pakistan's capital, Lahore, was Muridke, home to the Army of the Pure, which daily drilled recruits in slitting throats, dynamiting bridges, and rocket-attacking with precision blows. The Army of the Pure's goal was death to heretics--Indians, Russians, Americans, and Jews. John Stackhouse of the Toronto Globe and Mail delivered the following message from this arm of Allah's will made real:
"We will go to America with the gun," vows Sultan Atiqur Rehman Allehadi, who quit the Pakistani air force and now guides younger men in the Army of the Pure. "First we will ask them [Americans] to take up Islam. If they don't, then we will use the gun."*
Should Pakistan fall to the Fundamentalists this would give Islam's ultra-militants a heroic Roto-Rooter with which to extirpate American impiety. Zealots would control Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, called by its cheering supporters when it was first tested in 1998, "The Islamic Bomb." The result, said Australian journalist Greg Sheridan, could be "devastating."
Then there was the Saudi-backed Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), which had turned the hinterlands of Egypt into a killing field, slaying tourists, assassinating policemen, stabbing moderate writers, and massacring Christians who'd been in the land of Egypt since long before Mohammed's birth. Russia, China, and the Central Asian Republics--Turkmenistan, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan--feared they were next on Allah's hit list. Those fears turned real in 1999 when Chechen guerrillas, led by a Jordanian and reportedly financed by the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden, opened a war to establish a Fundamentalist Islamic state whose borders would range, as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin put it, "from the North Caucasus to the Pamirs." On a Western internet discussion group, an Islamic militant who spoke for many laid out the Word as he sees it: "The oppression and aggression of the United States of America and its protectorates has no end. So it is time that they pay, and it is time that their people taste... torment...."
howardbloom.net |
