Osama Bin Laden Inspirational Quotes

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane -- as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout -- there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans. Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it ill be with us long after his demise. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on the matters of the spirit. The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end -- wealth, fame, eternal salvation -- but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic's worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture. Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God...

I will kill you, and I shall do so in such a way, this world will cease its wars. The world shall be unified in its mourning, not because it misses you, but because of the atrocities which I, alone, will have wrought upon your mangled corpse. And even after the cannons fall silent, I will never be caught. New monsters will be born into folklore to explain what I have done to you.

Osama bin Laden drew inspiration from Hezbollah’s dual suicide attacks against the multinational forces in Beirut in 1983. Al Qaeda’s first simultaneous suicide attacks on two U.S. embassies in eastern Africa on August 7, 1998, were directly modeled on Hezbollah’s 1983 attacks. Al Qaeda’s coordinated suicide missions expanded the model three years later for four simultaneous airplane hijackings on September 11, 2001. The nineteen Islamic jihadists, who were armed only with box cutters, successfully hijacked four commercial planes to carry out their suicide mission. Their bravado spoke for itself in that they didn’t even bother to have a backup plan.

Like the Protestants of the sixteenth century, the Muslim fundamentalists are a relatively new force on the wider Islamic scene. Wahhabism—the dour, repressive creed espoused by the Saudis and the Osama bin Ladens of this world—only dates from the mid-eighteenth century. The strain of Islam that inspired the Taliban, which has become pretty much indistinguishable from Wahhabism, cropped up in India just a little over a century ago. So when we talk about Islamic fundamentalism, we are not talking about some ancient essence of Islam, we’re talking about something relatively modern.

[T]he Afghan war was the folly of the crowd of senile old men who were in charge in the late U.S.S.R. And they were, literally, senile. By 1979 the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee resembled our very own Geriatric Park. According to official figures, over the ten years of the war, we lost 15,000 people. According to a study of officers of the General Staff, the total was 26,000. Nobody has any idea how many Afghans were killed; the estimates vary from 600,000 to 2 million. The overwhelming majority were civilians. More than 5 million people became refugees. The war sucked huge financial resources out of a U.S.S.R. that was rapidly becoming impoverished. At the same time it undermined morale both in the army and in the country at large. General Secretary Brezhnev and his generals who dreamed all this up wanted to play geopolitical games in pursuit of superiority over the United States, but in the end they only inflicted a mortal wound on their own nation. The Afghan war was momentous not only for us but for the rest of the world as well. We are experiencing its direct consequences to this day. To a significant extent, current Islamic extremism grew out of it. Responding to the criminal stupidity of the Soviet leaders, the U.S. government behaved no less stupidly by doing its utmost to turn a war of the Afghan mujahideen against the U.S.S.R. into an Islamic jihad. Back then, in the 1980s, volunteers from all over the Middle East flocked to the region, and the war changed from being a confrontation between socialism and capitalism, as the Soviet Union insisted it was, into a holy war against infidels. Only the notion that people who had taken up arms in defense of their religion could be switched off by a political decision, that you could say, "Okay, guys, that's enough. We've won, let's all go home," was disastrously mistaken. It was not enough for people who had risen up under the green banners of Islam simply to drive out the Soviet troops. The slogans that had inspired them were something they really believed in. Having driven out the U.S.S.R., they demanded the transformation of Afghanistan into a country governed under sharia law. Osama bin Laden, to whom the Americans had donated money and weapons, was already mutating into their enemy, because the two sides' aims were diverging. The United States was losing interest and no longer wished to finance jihad. For a religious fanatic, however, those who are not with us are against us. It was in Afghanistan, where they had gone to wage a holy war, that the leaders of the Islamic State like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became who they were. That war is continuing even today.

[T]he Afghan war was the folly of the crowd of senile old men who were in charge in the late U.S.S.R. And they were, literally, senile. By 1979 the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee resembled our very own Geriatric Park. According to official figures, over the ten years of the war, we lost 15,000 people. According to a study of officers of the General Staff, the total was 26,000. Nobody has any idea how many Afghans were killed; the estimates vary from 600,000 to 2 million. The overwhelming majority were civilians. More than 5 million people became refugees. The war sucked huge financial resources out of a U.S.S.R. that was rapidly becoming impoverished. At the same time it undermined morale both in the army and in the country at large. General Secretary Brezhnev and his generals who dreamed all this up wanted to play geopolitical games in pursuit of superiority over the United States, but in the end they only inflicted a mortal wound on their own nation. The Afghan war was momentous not only for us but for the rest of the world as well. We are experiencing its direct consequences to this day. To a significant extent, current Islamic extremism grew out of it. Responding to the criminal stupidity of the Soviet leaders, the U.S. government behaved no less stupidly by doing its utmost to turn a war of the Afghan mujahideen against the U.S.S.R. into an Islamic jihad. Back then, in the 1980s, volunteers from all over the Middle East flocked to the region, and the war changed from being a confrontation between socialism and capitalism, as the Soviet Union insisted it was, into a holy war against infidels. Only the notion that people who had taken up arms in defense of their religion could be switched off by a political decision, that you could say, "Okay, guys, that's enough. We've won, let's all go home," was disastrously mistaken. It was not enough for people who had risen up under the green banners of Islam simply to drive out the Soviet troops. The slogans that had inspired them were something they really believed in. Having driven out the U.S.S.R., they demanded the transformation of Afghanistan into a country governed under sharia law. Osama bin Laden, to whom the Americans had donated money and weapons, was already mutating into their enemy, because the two sides' aims were diverging. The United States was losing interest and no longer wished to finance jihad. For a religious fanatic, however, those who are not with us are against us. It was in Afghanistan, where they had gone to wage a holy war, that the leaders of the Islamic State like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became who they were. That war is continuing even today.