An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (23 page)

In 1995 Abdel-Rahman and his team were tried and convicted; they are all serving life sentences.

But Abdel-Rahman’s followers remained active following his capture. In 1997 a jihadist group in Egypt shot and killed more than sixty tourists visiting the ancient temples of Luxor. The perpetrators were none other than Abdel-Rahman’s own personal Egyptian theological gangsters, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. They mutilated some bodies and left leaflets at the scene demanding the release of Abdel-Rahman.

In late June 2012, in his first public speech, the Egyptian president-elect, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, promised to work for the release of Abdel-Rahman—the blind sheikh—to have him extradited to Egypt on humanitarian grounds.

On September 11, 2012, at a sit-in protest a large group of Egyptian Salafists demanded the release of Abdel-Rahman. They yelled, “Death
to Jews!” and insisted that the army of Islam would rise up under the leadership of Abdel-Rahman.

In January 2013 President Morsi again demanded Abdel-Rahman’s release. Also in January 2013, al-Qaeda in North Africa commandeered an Algerian oil company and took many foreign hostages. The hostage takers also demanded the release of Abdel-Rahman. At least thirty-seven foreigners were murdered as the Algerian army ended the standoff.

R
emember how the Saudis turned to the infidel French in 1979 when the Grand Mosque in Mecca was captured? Nearly twenty years later, in 1990, after having proved himself against the Soviets, bin Laden expected the Saudi royals to use him when Iraq invaded Kuwait. However, both the Saudis and the Kuwaitis spurned bin Laden’s offers and again turned to infidels for military assistance.

By the time of the first Gulf War, bin Laden had made quite a name for himself. Between 1980 and 1989 (and with the blessing of the Saudi government), he became the chief financier of the Afghan resistance. He also trained, supplied, and funded Arab warriors to join the Afghan mujahideen and set up special Arab military bases in Afghanistan.

In 1988 bin Laden founded al-Qaeda for the purpose of waging a global jihad.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Saudis rejected Osama’s military services. Just as his Saudi father and older half-brothers had once spurned him, now the Saudi princes had also rejected him. Osama was furious and grew bitter.

In 1992 the Saudi king threw bin Laden out of the kingdom. Bin Laden found shelter in Sudan.

Between 1993 and 2000, and with the help of Dr. Ayman Muhammad al-Zawahiri and Omar Abdel-Rahman (the blind sheikh), bin Laden engineered a series of murderous attacks against American soldiers and embassies in the Middle East and Africa (Mogadishu, Riyadh, Dhahran, Kenya, Tanzania, Aden, and others).

In 1996 Sudan bowed to mounting international pressure and kicked bin Laden out.

That year bin Laden released his “Declaration of Jihad,” and the Saudi kingdom revoked his citizenship. That’s when bin Laden fled to Afghanistan, where the warlord Mullah Omar offered to protect him.

Bin Laden hatched his 9/11 plan in Afghanistan.

Once I was at the mercy of tribal law in Afghanistan. Now the entire world seemed at its mercy as well.

Ten long years passed, but bin Laden could not be found. Perhaps, like Saddam Hussein, he was living below ground in a rat hole. Or maybe he was living in an elite villa in Abbottabad, Pakistan, protected by America’s presumed allies, the Pakistani generals and Inter-Services Intelligence. Indeed this is precisely where Navy SEAL Team Six found and assassinated him in May 2011.

But, as we saw in Benghazi on 9/11/12, al-Qaeda is not dead.

A
long time ago, when feminists first raised the issue of rape, we were immediately accused of hating men. Eventually, wearily, I came to say: “All men are not rapists—but almost all rapists are men.”

Similarly I am not saying that all Muslims or all Arabs are terrorists. I say: “Today most terrorists are Muslim Islamists.”

I work with some of the Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents and feminists whom I have named in this book. These brave souls have sounded the alarm against radical Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. The lucky ones have fled to the West. Some live under armed guard or in hiding and write under pseudonyms. Many have been forced to defend their writings and teachings in courts of law in both Europe and North America. The unlucky dissidents have been jailed, tortured, or murdered.

Good people in the West have often failed to distinguish between Islam and Islamism; academics and journalists have been reluctant to accuse any Muslim of doing anything bad (like blowing up a hotel or ethnically cleansing black Africans, Jews, Hindus, and Christians), lest they be accused of profiling and Islamophobia.

I understand that racism is a valid concern, a burning issue. I am also an antiracist. But 9/11 had nothing to do with race. It was part of an aggressive political, military, and religious crusade.

America was attacked by ideologues who want infidels (of every race and ethnicity) to get out of Muslim holy lands. They also want Muslim women covered and subordinate. These ideologues are also at war with other branches of Islam, with promodern Muslim governments, and with individual Muslim freethinkers.

Such ideologues live on every continent; their complexions are all the colors of the human race. African-born and Caucasian converts to Islam, including women and former prisoners, are becoming more numerous in the West. The subject deserves a separate book. Some are sincerely religious or for psychological reasons require a strong and regimented structure. Others are highly politicized Islamists.

In the name of freedom they demand the right to renounce freedom. In the language of tolerance they demand that intolerance be granted a dignified place at the table.

I once debated a British convert to Islam, Yvonne Ridley, on Alhurra TV. On September 28, 2001, Ridley was kidnapped in Afghanistan and held by the Taliban in solitary confinement for seven days. They tried to convert her, and she promised to read the Qur’an when she was free.

Afterward Ridley converted to Islam—no, she became a true believer: a hater of Israel, America, and the godless West. Ridley’s instant rage level in a public debate was unsettling, even as political theater.

P
ersecuting and scapegoating infidels is a time-honored way of diverting attention from some real villains. The truth is that Muslim-on-Muslim violence is far greater than infidel-on-Muslim violence.

What Islamists accuse their enemies of doing (engaging in conspiracies, telling lies, controlling the media, brainwashing, lusting for a new colonial empire) is precisely what they themselves are doing.

In 1996 a stateless bin Laden published an 11,831-word fatwa entitled “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Lands of the Two Holy Places.” It also appeared in English in a London newspaper. It is quite a toxic read. He writes, “The people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed upon them by the Zionist-Crusader alliance and their collaborators. [Muslims] are the main target for the aggression.”

He attributes all Muslim suffering to this alliance—and concludes that “fighting [waging jihad] against the Kuffar [infidel] in every part of the world is absolutely essential.”

Bin Laden defines
jihad
as a strictly military operation, not as an inner spiritual struggle. He writes, “There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land,” which includes or is symbolized by the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

The Al Aqsa Mosque was established in 705 CE—it stands right above the site of the pre-existing first and second Jewish Temples which were established in 957 BCE and 515 BCE, respectively—well over a millennia earlier.

Over and over again bin Laden condemns the Saudi regime, which he does not explicitly name, for having suspended “Islamic Shari’ah law and exchanging it with man-made civil law”; for its “inability to protect
the country”; and for “allowing the enemy of the Ummah [the Muslim people]—the American crusader forces—to occupy the land.”

He is really angry at the Saudis, his father’s people, for having rejected and expelled him, for not rewarding his greatness. Although he mentions them repeatedly, he dares not focus on attacking them. He targets only the approved scapegoats.

He hates and despises America, Israel, and infidels everywhere.

He becomes the loving Father of Death to all the surrogate sons he sends to kill and die. Bin Laden promises his young jihadists paradise and the usual seventy-two virgins. Addressing the American secretary of defense, bin Laden writes, “[Our] youths love death as you love life. . . . Our youth believe in paradise after death. . . . If death is a pre-determined must, then it is a shame to die cowardly. . . . Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youths to wait for their turn in fighting and in operations.”

W
hat if bin Laden is right? What if our love of life and our own ethical standards turn out to be our undoing? How should the West fight against terrorists—by patiently infiltrating their groups, through targeted assassinations and drone attacks? Traditional military approaches cannot win in urban guerrilla warfare as terrorists happily hide behind Muslim civilians—including women and children.

My Israeli colleague says, “Now the world will understand what Israel has been facing. We have been attacked every day, both on the ground and in the world media. The Palestinians are still lobbing rockets into southern Israel and terrifying our civilians. The false propaganda against us has grown in quantum leaps.”

“I know,” I say. “In 2004 I estimated that the number of Israeli civilians who had, by then, died in a Palestinian Islamist terrorist attack was, in American demographic terms, the equivalent of 30,000–40,000 American deaths and approximately 300,000 Americans wounded.”

“Well, then, just think about it. America invaded Afghanistan after only 3,000 American deaths,” my Israeli friend notes.

It is true: 9/11- and Boston marathon–style terrorism might be new to America, but it was a daily reality for Israelis, who were shot down or blown up in their beds, cafes, nightclubs, hotels, hospitals, schools, and on buses for the last seventy years of the twentieth century. Matters worsened considerably with a new Palestinian intifada (uprising), which began a year before 9/11.

This jihad against the Jews went global. The genie had again escaped from the bottle, and the world inherited the whirlwind.

What had been happening to Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Bahai civilians (at the hands of Islamist terrorists) in the Middle East, India, South and Central Asia, the Far East, and the Muslim parts of Africa was now happening to civilians in North and South America and in Europe.

O
ver the years Abdul-Kareem has condemned the way in which the world first turned its back on Afghanistan and then jumped in for its own gains.

“Why don’t they all just get the hell out and allow us to develop our mineral wealth, our gas and oil? Why did America use us to fight their Cold War against the Russians? Why did America abandon us to the Arabs and the Pakistanis once the Cold War ended?”

These are fair questions.

I acknowledge that American oil interests and American Cold War realities dictated our foreign policies. America did support the worst tyrants, the most dangerous reactionaries, to contain communism and protect the oil trade. These tyrants also held back the Islamist tide.

Many Westerners condemn imperialism, colonialism, and racism and believe that only the West is guilty of such crimes. This is not true. The West has behaved very badly—but so has the East. The West has changed, even repented somewhat; the East has yet to do so. We have abolished slavery and fought for human and women’s rights; the East has yet to do so.

According to Ibn Warraq, most recently in his book
Why the West Is
Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy,
Islamic culture is historically characterized by imperialism, colonialism, infidel hatred, militant jihad, massacres, genocide, conversion by the sword, antiblack racism, slavery, and gender and religious apartheid. These facts are poorly understood and often denied.

Many antiracists believe that American white supremacists, including police officers, have targeted, falsely charged, and even murdered African American boys and men. While racism definitely plays a role in who gets imprisoned and sentenced to death—it is also true that American law enforcement is facing an epidemic of black-on-black violence. Because feelings run hot and high on these issues and the matter remains unresolved, many antiracists project their negative feelings toward legal authority onto American military and counterterrorist intelligence forces. They view them as analogous to white supremacist police—and
they view the most violent jihadists as being targeted for racial reasons, and not because they are enemy combatants and transnational soldiers in a military–religious war against the West.

W
hat was the father of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, like as a human being, as a son, a husband, and a father?

After divorcing and banishing Osama’s Syrian mother, Allia,
Osama’s own father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, had little time for him; in his mother’s absence Osama was mocked as the son of the slave by his fathers’ other wives, and by Osama’s half-brothers and half-sisters. He had fifty-six siblings. According to his son Omar, “There was something odd that I had noticed from my youth. Never once did I hear my father call his father, ‘my father.’ Instead, he always referred to him as ‘your grandfather.’ I have no explanation for this, other than it seemed to pain him to use the words ‘my father.’”

In the days following 9/11, I was struck by how angry Osama was because President Bush had not immediately interrupted his reading of a story to a little girl to respond to the great—and greatly spurned—Osama. I remember wondering whether Osama was still vying for paternal or for male presidential attention.