One of the best books I read this year is Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Inside Al Qaeda And The Path to 9/11 and he traces its roots back to Sayyid Qutb (who Lawrence Helm has been talking about for some time) and Hassan al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood. He contends that Egypt is the cradle of modern Islamic terrorism, and Ayman al- Zawahiri's al-Jihad, The Islamic Group (responsible for Sadat's assassination) and the Muslim Brothers form the core. The victory in Afghanistan against the Soviets emboldened the jihadis and showed how many young men were willing to die for the cause. Martyrdom was the product being sold and radicalism filled the gap, with Abdullah Azzam playing a primary role on bin Laden's thinking about global jihad.
Shortly after al Qaeda is formed Azzam is killed and it was Azzam that was "was in favor of forming a 'pioneering vanguard' along the lines called for by Qutb. It was 'This vanguard constitutes the solid base for the hoped-for society.'" Earlier Azzam helped create Hamas, based on the Muslim Brotherhood, with small cells no larger than five people, as a counterweight to Yasser Arafat's secular PLO. Bin Laden returns to Saudi Arabia a hero after being in Afghanistan, a mythic figure. And though secretly he praised the U.S. for their help in Afghanistan he tentatively started developing his anti- American rhetoric that would eventually lead to plans of attack. He is deeply shamed that the U.S. comes to Saudi Arabia's defense against Saddam Hussein and pleads for an Islamic only defense, a ridiculous notion in a country that small against a military of Iraq's size.
But maybe the most memorable part of the book is his portrayal of the FBI's John O'Neil - brought to life by Harvey Keitel in ABC's The Path to 9/11 - who was one of the first national intelligence figures who saw the threat of international terrorism. O'Neill was thought crazy for his obsession with bin Laden and capturing him and after becoming fed up with the bureaucracy in the government he took a job in August '01 as head of security at the WTC and was killed in the towers on 9/11. A good read that took Wright five years of research to compile. The New York Times Review Of Books put it on their Top 10 of '06 as well.
One year ago, last September in New York City, Christopher Hitchens debated George Galloway and one of their exchanges really sums up the beliefs of the Left concerning the war on terror and how we brought it all on ourselves:
Galloway: "9/11 came out of a swamp of hatred created by us".
Hitchens: "You picked the wrong city to say that and the wrong
month...This is sinister piffle, masochism offered to you by a sadist."
Masochism indeed. Howard Zinn, who doesn't get as much press as Noam Chomsky but is surely more read, and readable, was on Dennis Prager's show this year and here is part of the exchange:
Prager: the idea that the United States is a force for the betterment of humanity...what would you say on a report card—we have done more bad than good, we’re in the middle or what? Zinn: Well, probably more bad than good. We’ve done some good, of course; there’s no doubt about that. But we have done too many bad things in the world. You know, if you look at the way we have used our armed force throughout our history...
Prager: Are you prepared to say that war is ever the best moral choice? Zinn: NoPrager: so do you feel that by and large the Zarqawi world and the Bush world are moral equivalents? Zinn: I do. I would put Bush on trial along with Saddam Hussein, because I think both of them are responsible for the deaths of many many people in Iraq, and uh so yes I think that...killing innocent people is immoral and when Iraqis do it, and when we do it it is the same thing.
~Brian Birmingham, AL On Dec 12, 2006, at 10:32 AM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
Many of the people referring to Al Quaeda don’t understand them. Al Quaeda did not expect effective opposition. Osama argued (see Osama’s readily available speeches, many of which were posted here) that the US would not be able to stand against his fierce warriors -- that his Jihad was irresistible. So it is absurd to say that it is only our resistance to Al Quaeda that causes Al Quaeda. To say such things is to foster a mindless political slogan. It doesn’t take much study to realize how false it is. I wonder why more people in this vaunted information age don’t avail themselves of more accurate information about Al Quaeda.What is the danger of Leftism today? They represent a political position that is largely anti-American. In any conflict, they side with the enemies of the US. They make excuses for the enemy’s excesses and find ways to blame the US for them. Something the US did caused these enemies to be enemies. They have abandoned the traditional American viewpoint that our nation is the best that the human race has yet produced.