Abstract
It was Fall 2006, less than five years ago. George Bush was President of the USA. The war on terror was full throttle forward. The October issue of US News & World Report had the following insert box in its “Washington Whispers” Section:
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Notes
- 1.
US News &World Report, 9 Oct 06:16.
- 2.
Paul Grieve, A Brief Guide to Islam – History, Faith & Politics (London: Running Press, 2006): 314.
- 3.
“New Saud in the House”, interview with Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Magazine August 28, 2005,11.
- 4.
Jason Burke. Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, xxiii-xxiv.
- 5.
Charles B. Strozier et al., The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 6.
Beyond this oft-repeated contrast of opposites, there is the simple definition offered by Louise Richardson: “Terrorism simply means deliberately and violently targeting civilians for political purposes”. Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (New York: Random House 2007), 4.
Yet as Richardson herself goes on to note, it is reversible, and it also can have government, intelligence and military as well as civilian targets. Most analysts, even the most astute, such as Marc Sageman, focus on terrorists or terror networks rather than terrorism per se. See also Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
- 7.
See the html: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1245650/Osama-Bin-Laden-tape-warns-Barack-Obama, with the racy title “From Osama to Obama”. We now know that it was his reliance on courier service to provide him information, and also to deliver his messages to the world, that finally allowed the US Intelligence Services to track him down to his latest, and last, hide out, in the Abbottabad compound, where he was killed on 2 May 2011.
- 8.
W. Flagg Miller, “On ‘The Summit of the Hindu Kush’: Osama Bin Laden’s 1996 Declaration of War Reconsidered”, unpublished talk delivered at University of Michigan in March 2005. Cited by permission of the author.
- 9.
See Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks, 173. OBL seems to be “the opposite of a narcissist. He is publicly self-effacing and seems content to relinquish control of an organization (which would have implied a hierarchial structure) for the sake of efficacy. He shows his disapproval not by killing his potential rivals but simply by withdrawing funds from them until they come back to his fold. This type of leadership is rare and may well account for the robustness of the global Salafi jihad, its ability to respond to changing conditions, and its widespread appeal to (some) Muslim youths.” Michael Scheuer has similarly accented OBL’s flexibility and his ability to survive against all odds as major measures of his heroic stature. “As each year passes,” wrote Scheuer just months before May 2011, “his status as a contemporary Islamic hero grows, as does the Saladin-like legend he will eventually leave in the annals of Islam’s history.” (Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 133.
- 10.
See Strozier, The Fundamentalist Mindset, for elaboration of this mindset as a psychological reflex.
- 11.
Emmanuel Sivan, “The Enclave Culture” in Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalism Comprehended (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995):11–68.
- 12.
Both Lawrence Wright and Steve Coll hint at the impact that an absent yet idealized father had on the young OBL. See Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower – Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11(New York: Knopf, 2006), 71–74, and Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens – The Story of a Family and Its Fortune (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 137–140.
- 13.
This and all subsequent references are to Bruce B. Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (London & New York: Verso, November 2005). Hereafter abbreviated as MW, it is the first comprehensive collection of interviews, pronouncements, and legal directives made by the now deceased Saudi fugitive/terrorist/global jihadist. The current reference is to MW # 4.
- 14.
See Vincent Olivetti, Terror’s Source: The Ideology of Wahhabi-Salafism and its Consequences: 21–48. Despite the overgeneralizations of the author, the frame of his analysis is correct, his insights helpful.
- 15.
See MW # 3.
- 16.
See below MW Fragment # 2 from 27.12.2004.
- 17.
See the (too) brief reference to Al-Sahab in Hugh Miles, Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World (London:Abacus, 2005), 180. Other sources are equally dismissive or neglectful of this crucial conduit to the OBL media strategy.
- 18.
See MW # 7.
- 19.
Burke, Al-Qaeda: 175.
- 20.
W. Flagg Miller, “On ‘The Summit of the Hindu Kush’: Osama Bin Laden’s 1996 Declaration of War Reconsidered”, unpublished talk delivered at University of Michigan in March 2005. Cited by permission of the author.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/247.pdf, a survey of sixteen nations, released on 23 June 2005, and then the sequel from 2011: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1977/poll-osama-bin-laden-death-confidence-muslim-publics-al-qaeda-favorability.
- 23.
MW # 19.
- 24.
See The Independent Wednesday 17 August 2005, for a two page spread in the Science & Technology subset of Life & Culture: 38–39. “Jihad: play the game”, by Rebecca Armstrong. The subtitle reads: “Western PC games feature US forces destroying Arab enemies. Now Islam is fighting back.”
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Lawrence, B.B. (2011). Osama Bin Laden: The Man and the Myth. In: Strozier, C., Offer, D., Abdyli, O. (eds) The Leader. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8387-9_6
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