World Famous Cults and Fanatics (24 page)

The death toll caused by the destruction of Twin Towers has been estimated as 2,752 people.
(This figure remains debatable, as officials have refused to include dozens of missing homeless people
and illegal immigrants who are thought – but cannot be proved – to have been in the disaster area.)

At 9.40 a.m., a third hijacked Boeing 757 struck the west side of the Pentagon building in Washington DC – the nerve centre of the US Military; 189 people were killed.

At 10.37 a.m., the fourth and last hijacked plane crashed in open countryside near Shanksville Pennsylvania, killing all forty-four on board.
A mobile phone message from a passenger just before
the crash said that he and some others were going to try to recapture the plane from terrorists.
It has been speculated that, if the hijackers had not crashed the Shanksville plane prematurely,
they would have tried to collide the jet into Camp David – the presidential rural retreat in Maryland.
American President George W.
Bush Junior was not in residence at the time, but Camp
David was where the historic peace accord between Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was signed in 1978: a hated symbol of Arab–Israeli cooperation
to many Moslem fundamentalists.

The death toll for what has come to be known simply as “9/11” (i.e.
– 11 September 2001) – including the nineteen suicide hijackers – is 2,985 people.

It is known that the hijackers were Islamic fundamentalists – and were mostly Saudi Arabians.
The al-Qaeda terrorist network, headed by Osama bin Laden, is strongly suspected of being
behind the 11 September hijackings.
Much has been written and said about Osama bin Laden – much of it understandably vitriolic screeds that have raised the man to a similar level of infamy as
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin – but is he, as he is so often described, a man dedicated to “evildoing”?

The tabloid view of Osama bin Laden is that of a foam-mouthed, rabid-eyed Islamic fanatic, driven by a hatred of Western decency.
To quote US President George W.
Bush from a speech to Congress
in September 2001: “They [bin Laden and al-Queda] hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

On the other hand, Western journalists who have actually met bin Laden have described him as mild-mannered, hospitable and even rather introverted.
His hatred of the West and anything that does
not fall under his cruel interpretation of Islamic law cannot be denied, but neither has he been legally proved to have been directly involved with the 9/11 atrocity.

The main evidence presented to date – a very rough video recording in which bin Laden apparently confesses to being told about the attacks five days before they happened – is now
widely suspected to be a fake.
But even if the tape is real and the statement is true, bin Laden’s “confession” actually exonerates him of the charge of planning the 9/11 attacks.
The plot was years in the making, not five days.
The FBI and CIA had evidence of the coming attack longer than that, but few people suspect that the federal government was behind the attacks.

Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957.
His mother was Syrian and his father was from Yemen, so Osama automatically inherited three nationalities.
His father had built a considerable
fortune in the construction business, helped in no small part by his close ties to both the Saudi royal family and, ironically enough, with certain American oil dynasties, including that of
President George Bush.

Osama certainly had a privileged upbringing – he was well-educated, trained in engineering, speaks fluent English and inherited a personal fortune in the multi-millions – but, unlike
many Saudi rich kids of his generation, he held firmly to Wahhabi Islamic principals (“Wahhabi” is roughly equivalent to the Christian term “Puritan”).
This certainly led to
his present, absolutist frame of mind, but to blame Islam for the crimes of Islamic terrorists is like blaming the Bible for the Spanish Inquisition.

The Koran is one of the few holy books to stress the Allah-given right of the individual to free thought.
It also expressly forbids anyone from claiming to be a Prophet of Allah – Mohammad
is said to have been the “true and final Prophet” – with the result that Islam has suffered from relatively few mad messiahs in its history.
We have already seen numerous examples
of just how useful such an explicit prohibition might have been in the Christian Bible.

It is certainly true that the version of Islam professed by Osama bin Laden – the repression of women, the legal curtailment of most forms of secular entertainment, the enforced growing of
beards and the willingness to condone mass killing – is cruel and ultra-conservative enough to shock and disgust liberals of all stripes, but it is not strictly true that he is entirely
motivated by a hatred of Western freedoms.
Bin Laden fought for years to drive the Soviet invaders out of Afghanistan, spending much of his personal fortune and aided by advice and assistance from
the CIA (it should be noted, however, that bin Laden always refused US financial aid, apparently regarding the money of infidels to be unsuitable for a holy war).

Despite its present “evil-doer” image in the West, al-Qaeda was essentially a support organization for the Afghan and foreign freedom fighters, who called themselves the mujahideen
(Arabic for “strugglers”).
Bin Laden’s network was originally a number of safe houses and secret training bases (al-Qaeda means “the base”) where mujahideen could rest
and train to defeat the Communist and, more importantly for bin Laden, atheist interlopers.

Following the victory of the Afghan freedom fighters, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, and was disappointed when he and his fellow freedom fighters did not receive a heroes’ welcome.
Later, in August 1990 when the Iraqi leader, Sadam Hussein, invaded the small but oil-rich Gulf State of Kuwait, bin Laden feared that the secularist dictator might soon try to invade the holy
motherland of Saudi Arabia itself.
He went to the Saudi authorities and offered to raise a new mujahideen army to defend the country – he clearly saw that the small Saudi army would be no
match for the giant Iraqi war machine.

He was thus infuriated when his offer was flatly refused, then became incandescent with rage when the Saudi royal family invited half a million US soldiers to come and defend the Saudi homeland.
To call on foreigners – most of whom were not of the Islamic faith – to defend the holy cities of Mecca and Medina was, in bin Laden’s eyes, treachery and sacrilege combined.
In
1991 he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for stating these views too publicly.

He spent the next five years in Sudan, fomenting and an anti-US interest group, but not, so far as the present evidence suggests, actually plotting any terrorist actions.
At first the Saudi
government tried to woo him back by offering to rescind his order of exile, but he refused.
So they froze his known financial assets and stripped him of his Saudi citizenship.
The US then put
pressure on the Sudanese government to expel bin Laden, prompting his return to Afghanistan.

Since the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Afghanistan had been in a state of endless civil war – first between the remains of the Soviet puppet government and the mujahideen freedom fighters,
then between numerous petty warlords, all seeking to control Afghanistan’s huge opium trade.
In contrast to the days of the Soviet occupation, the West – and the CIA – showed
little or no interest in Afghanistan’s new agonies.

Then a group of Koran students, calling themselves the Taliban, raised a religious army and swept across the country, all but wiping the warlords off the map.
The West initially applauded the
return of order to Afghanistan, but soon became uneasy at extreme theocratic tyranny set up by the Taliban.

Women were essentially imprisoned in their homes and could be executed if they allowed any man, other than their husband, see them even partially naked.
Since female doctors – and all
other female professions – were banned, this effectively denied health care to the entire female population.
Almost all signs of public frivolity were also outlawed and breaking any one of
dozens of highly intolerant theocratic laws could lead to a public execution – about the only form of public entertainment that the Taliban felt was harmless.
This was the atmosphere that
greeted Osama bin Laden when he returned to Afghanistan.

Becoming increasingly radical, bin Laden started to make public calls for a global war to end American imperialism and Israeli suppression of the Palestinians – this last was undoubtedly
hypocritical, as Palestinian immigrants are also treated extremely badly in many Islamic countries.
In 1998 he called for a fatwa (a religious ruling in the name of all Islam) to destroy the United
States and those, like Israel and the Saudi royal family, who sided with them.
Shortly thereafter, simultaneous bomb attacks levelled the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 258 people and
injuring over 5,000.
Bin Laden denied he was behind the attacks, but several captured terrorists implicated him as the source of funds for the operation.

In 1998, US President Bill Clinton (floundering in allegations of sexual misconduct literally in office) gave the go-ahead for two non-nuclear cruise missile strikes.
One destroyed a factory in
Sudan with financial links to bin Laden.
It was claimed that it was a nerve gas production facility, but later turned out to have been a medicine factory.
The second strike was aimed at bin Laden
himself, in Afghanistan, but failed to kill him.

It is not known how many casualties were caused by these missile strikes, but if the US hoped to break al-Qaeda, it was to be brutally disappointed.
Thanks to the publicity resulting from the
United States trying – and failing – to kill one man, every Islamic fanatic on the planet started to feel kinship with bin Laden.
The result is the Islamic terrorist network – of
which al-Qaeda is just a part – that has replaced nuclear war as the West’s greatest fear.

In October 2000, a suicide bomb hidden in a small boat detonated against the side of the USS
Cole
, docked in the port of Aden.
Seventeen US sailors were killed.
Bin Laden applauded the
attack, but denied direct involvement.
The world steeled itself for more such acts of murder, but when the next one came, on 11 September 2001, it left the planet flabbergasted.

The American-led invasion of Afghanistan has since crushed the Taliban theocracy, and it is now rumoured that the still fugitive bin Laden is suffering from a severe kidney dysfunction.
If so,
it is probable that he is very ill, reliant on a dialysis machine, and is therefore unlikely to be much more than a figurehead for the global cell system of radical Islamic terrorists.

To call bin Laden a mad messiah would be to overstate his importance to the beliefs he seeks to represent, and to define al-Queda and their fellow travellers as a cult of fanatics is to
oversimplify a complex socio-political situation.
Murderous, bigoted thugs they may be, but their cause is far from mindless; few, even of the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, have actually
called for the whole world to be forced to convert to Islam – most just want an end to excessive Western influence in Islamic affairs.
Many Moslems, extremist and mainstream, argue that
Western nations have unashamedly exploited and politically manipulated the Middle East for over a century.
It was deep-seated resentment at this ruthless economic imperialism, as they see it, that
was the main cause of the 9/11 atrocity.

Noam Chomsky, the respected American academic and social commentator, remarked only days after the 9/11 atrocity: “[It] is common knowledge among anyone who pays attention to the [Middle
East] region, that the terrorists draw from a reservoir of desperation, anger, and frustration that extends from rich to poor, from secular to radical Islamist.
That it is rooted in no small
measure in US policies is evident and constantly articulated to those willing to listen.”

Perhaps it is not enough to only strike back at a cult that apparently hates most of the world – non-Moslem infidels and liberal Moslems alike.
It may be necessary to ask why they hate
us.