My foray into that land of lunacy consisted of an e-mail blast (This was pre Facebook and Twitter) alleging breathlessly that the elusive terrorist capo had been smuggled into Canada by the Mossad and was living in Montreal east sans beard and robes. My top secret sources advised that he was earning his keep by delivering bags of fresh bagels for a Jewish bakery. He had taken the pseudonym "Ozzie Ben" and because of his daily labours was known on the Anglo street as Ozzie Bun Laden. Further, Mossad had retained the services of a local Jewish biker gang called Hillel's Angels to provide him protection.
As a conspiracy generator I was a failure. Not even the Toronto Sun bit on it. The RCMP never called. CSIS yawned. The CIA did not bother to tap my 'phone let alone stuff me in a sack and Fedex me to Syria to answer some friendly questions about my sources.
I failed. To console myself I did some solid research and wrote a long article about the historical context and longer term implications of the 911 attack on America and the rise of Al Qaeda. It was well-received by all readers including the print media. But no publication was prepared to print it because it ran so against the grain of the then prevailing public narrative.
I re-read the article today and am dismayed at how little we have learned over the past nine years. Here, unedited is what I said in 2002. I stand by it. More, I recommend that you take the time to read it.
__________________________________________
THE WORLD OF OSAMA BIN LADEN
March, 2002
"Man would fain be great and sees that he is littls; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of love and esteem of men and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults".
Pascal, Pencees
"...a mortal hatred against that truth..." Bin Laden. Jerry Falwell. Arafat. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in some ways. Even our own mostly harmless Canadian Prime Minister is, in minor and silly ways a sometime stranger to the truth.
Truth has gone begging. In its place we have the cant of the Believers and the fierce mass movements they inspire. Of these - and there are many about - Bin Laden's pan-Islamic fundamentalism has our exclusive attention, for obvious reasons. We do not understand it. Certainly, the Americans do not. George Bush is at pains to declare that America's War is not against Islam but rather against an amorphous group called terrorists or madmen or Islamic fundamentalists. Millions of Muslims worldwide would take issue with his claim.. For them, the war is religious and the President can think and say whatever he wants without changing that fact in the least.
Let us not adopt the ugly slur that most Muslims are terrorists or murderers prepared to strike down the infidels in the name of Allah. Remember - Germans were by no means unanimous in the desire to destroy the Jews and "misfits" in order to create an Aryan heaven but the Holocaust occurred. There is a parallel here which might help us understand and deal with the current terror walking the land. The parallel lies within the nature of mass movements and mob psychology writ large.
The Bin Laden Movement - it is best to call it that - is not a social dysfunction exclusive to Muslims, or Arabs or any other ethnic, national or religious group. We all have that capacity to go collectively mad and visit unspeakable acts on others.
The first step toward understanding the Bin Laden Movement, which has millions of supporters and apologists is available close to home among fundamentalist Christians. There is an anti-abortion organization, one of many, called Pro Life Virginia - Army of God. It is led by the charismatic and ferocious Reverend Donald Spitz. To call him bellicose would be to understate his passion. Spitz does not make apocalyptic statements from a cave somewhere in Afghanistan. He is a thoroughly modern Believer with an elaborate website (www.armyofgod.com). Read it - all of it. From his perspective, he and his followers are engaged in a Holy War against the infidels, which to him are all those who provide abortions or submit to them or support, even through indifference those who do. He proclaims a higher Biblical morality which permits he and his adherents the right to kill or counsel the killing of abortionists. Army of God has its heroes and martyrs, these being people that we would call murderers, terrorists, psychopaths or all of the above. Each martyr has an honoured place on the website rather in the manner of Palestinian suicide bomber photos on village walls. Currently, first among martyrs is "Atomic Dog" who shot and killed Dr. Bernard Slepian in front of his family.
Spitz and others like him have formidable followings but most Americans, whatever they think about abortion, birth control or Biblical authority despise his bloody extremism. Nor is the law amused. Police and courts will act when Spitz terrorists resort to violence but US constitutional protections ensure that Army of God can de facto counsel criminal behaviour.
To understand Spitz and his Army of God is to understand Bin Laden et al in a more helpful way; in a way that might lead to action capable of countering the extraordinary danger he represents to Western democracies and the Arab/Muslim diaspora he presumes to speak for.
America's current initiatives seem to be yesterday's solutions to tomorrow's problems. Bin Laden is the face and voice of a mass movement involving millions of people. That movement has no geographic epicentre, headquarters or uniformed army - like the Army of God. But it has soldiers willing to give their lives in the service of a higher moral calling as 911 demonstrated. It follows that we need to speculate that the bombing/invasion of Afghanistan and supporting the rapacious Northern Alliance may do nothing more than replace one ugly dictatorship with another while turning an impoverished country into a major supplier of crushed stone. An attack may also serve to strengthen Bin Laden's movement - hardly the avowed intention of the Bush Administration.
What is the genesis of the Army of God? How does this vicious, vitriolic lot sustain itself, find funding and gather new adherents? How does Bin Laden focus and fuel the anger and sometime zealotry of millions of Muslims - particularly Arab Muslims? The answer to both questions may be the same.
Page Break
Any destructive, self-referential organization begins with a legitimate grievance that most people would regard with interest and concern, whatever position they might hold about it. Abortion is such an issue. No reasonable, ethically-informed person sees abortion as a good thing save in the most extreme circumstances. There are no pro abortionists outside the mental hospitals, only people who have concluded that the inalienable rights of women to have full jurisdiction over their own bodies always trumps the sorry reality of destroying a fetus. So argues pro choice. It is an ethical and reasoned argument made by people who are mindful of of the ambiguity of the problem and may dream of a world in which abortion would never be necessary. For the record, pro choice does not like abortion.
It follows that a passionate and well-informed leader can rally large numbers of reasonable, decent people who wish to speak out against abortion, petition doctors not to perform them, persuade their sisters to avoid them and lobby legislators to provide generous funding for adoption services, child welfare, day care, birth control education and widely available, preferably free contraception services.
It also follows that these leaders can and do attract the people of whom Pascal spoke - "...those bereft any sense of self worth, bearing the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable and bearing a hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults." These people seek a Holy Cause rather than social change. The Cause does not need them so much as they need the Cause to provide them with some sense of purpose and belonging. The Cause becomes the substitute self. This suicide of the psyche permits the birth of "Atomic Dog" a.k.a. Janes Kopp, the Army of God martyr/murderer. In time the James Kopps prevail, the reasonable and decent depart and the self-referential "higher morality emerges in all of its bloody excess. The original premises become distorted and extended to absurdity. The Army of God is now anti sex education, anti birth control and in large measure anti human sexuality. They back their bizarre beliefs with terror, murder and destruction.
The ascendancy of Bin Laden's movement is not so simple as that of the Army of God but there are compelling parallels. Bin Laden was born to wealth and privilege and yet migrated from wealthy playboy to cave-dwelling fundamentalist. His conversion has much to do with his diminished self worth juxtaposed with fundamentalist religious instruction and the presence of a cause that had some objective merit in his mind and the minds of many Arab Muslims. The cause centres on the long-standing marginalization and humiliation of the Arab people by the West (Balfour Declaration, the lies of Lawrence of Arabia, US manipulation of Saudi Arabia etc.) and even more by their own governments which are and have been theocratic dictatorships for centuries.
It did not help that Islam's world froze in place in the 16th century. While the West suffered its religious wars, the Reformation, the separation by degrees of Church and State and the explosive growth of literacy made possible by the printing press, the world of Islam maintained the status quo. The West became economically powerful, expansionist, imperialistic and adventurous and the scales were tipped forever against Islam's feudal states. It was almost 200 years post Gutenberg that the Mullahs permitted the mechanical printing of Arabic texts. What a deficit that was and so saddening when you consider Arab/Islam's Golden age (9th to 14th centuries approximately) when their societies were socially open and they were the faithful conservators of wisdom. Arab scholars advanced theoretical mathematics, produced stunningly beautiful poetry, embraced science, valued education and even lovingly preserved early Christian literature. In that golden time, the Arab/Muslim world epitomized civilization. Europe, not so much. When Bin Laden styles himself as a latter day Saladin, he is not simply being a megalomaniac. He knows his history, the genesis of Muslim anger and that pervasive sense of being scorned and made "lesser than" by a world that left them behind. He knows how to exploit this anger and empower martyrs who find comfort and strength in his voice, as do countless other Muslims suffering in a world that has passed them by. The latter have no urge to become terrorists but it does allow them to straighten their backs and regain the pride and sense of self so long denied them by historical circumstance and their own collective errors. Only a small percentage - the "Atomic Dogs" are moved to violence but that could amount to 20,000 worldwide. What then of America's morally understandable but wildly wrong-headed military responses? Is not George Bush making Bin Laden's case for him? Americans are justifiably madder than hell which unfortunately is not a good state of mind from which to try to solve a huge, ambiguous and frightening problem.
Page Break
Bin Laden's movement will endure a while. It is a mass movement with a core of utterly committed "Atomic Dogs" at the core and the wider support of millions who do not endorse extremism but relate to the broad message. These millions are not tacit supporters because they are genetically or culturally disposed to evil and violence but because they stand condemned to be "lesser then" in a complicated world not of their making. They need a Cause in order to feel like men and women in full.
Pascal predicted both Bin Laden and Atomic Dog. So did Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer (Harper & Collins). Although published nearly a century ago and written by an uneducated stevedore, it is a book for our times - a brilliant primer on the origins and nature of mass movements. Hoffer would argue that we misunderstand the Bin Laden movement at our peril. It is not an army for all that it has soldiers. It is not a rogue state for all that it has tacit support in many states. It has no place and no centre. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It has no timetable or deadlines. Its beginnings are centuries old and its patience is infinite. It is not exclusively religious, social or cultural in character although it may adopt any one of these labels as a cloak of convenience. Its aims are obscure (to us) and changeable. Its most frightening characteristic is that it is desperately needed my its members and supporters. Therein is its strength.
There is no military solution to the threat. America must attempt war by other means - something in which they have no useful experience.
Truth has gone begging. In its place we have the cant of the Believers and the fierce mass movements they inspire. Of these - and there are many about - Bin Laden's pan-Islamic fundamentalism has our exclusive attention, for obvious reasons. We do not understand it. Certainly, the Americans do not. George Bush is at pains to declare that America's War is not against Islam but rather against an amorphous group called terrorists or madmen or Islamic fundamentalists. Millions of Muslims worldwide would take issue with his claim.. For them, the war is religious and the President can think and say whatever he wants without changing that fact in the least.
Let us not adopt the ugly slur that most Muslims are terrorists or murderers prepared to strike down the infidels in the name of Allah. Remember - Germans were by no means unanimous in the desire to destroy the Jews and "misfits" in order to create an Aryan heaven but the Holocaust occurred. There is a parallel here which might help us understand and deal with the current terror walking the land. The parallel lies within the nature of mass movements and mob psychology writ large.
The Bin Laden Movement - it is best to call it that - is not a social dysfunction exclusive to Muslims, or Arabs or any other ethnic, national or religious group. We all have that capacity to go collectively mad and visit unspeakable acts on others.
The first step toward understanding the Bin Laden Movement, which has millions of supporters and apologists is available close to home among fundamentalist Christians. There is an anti-abortion organization, one of many, called Pro Life Virginia - Army of God. It is led by the charismatic and ferocious Reverend Donald Spitz. To call him bellicose would be to understate his passion. Spitz does not make apocalyptic statements from a cave somewhere in Afghanistan. He is a thoroughly modern Believer with an elaborate website (www.armyofgod.com). Read it - all of it. From his perspective, he and his followers are engaged in a Holy War against the infidels, which to him are all those who provide abortions or submit to them or support, even through indifference those who do. He proclaims a higher Biblical morality which permits he and his adherents the right to kill or counsel the killing of abortionists. Army of God has its heroes and martyrs, these being people that we would call murderers, terrorists, psychopaths or all of the above. Each martyr has an honoured place on the website rather in the manner of Palestinian suicide bomber photos on village walls. Currently, first among martyrs is "Atomic Dog" who shot and killed Dr. Bernard Slepian in front of his family.
Spitz and others like him have formidable followings but most Americans, whatever they think about abortion, birth control or Biblical authority despise his bloody extremism. Nor is the law amused. Police and courts will act when Spitz terrorists resort to violence but US constitutional protections ensure that Army of God can de facto counsel criminal behaviour.
To understand Spitz and his Army of God is to understand Bin Laden et al in a more helpful way; in a way that might lead to action capable of countering the extraordinary danger he represents to Western democracies and the Arab/Muslim diaspora he presumes to speak for.
America's current initiatives seem to be yesterday's solutions to tomorrow's problems. Bin Laden is the face and voice of a mass movement involving millions of people. That movement has no geographic epicentre, headquarters or uniformed army - like the Army of God. But it has soldiers willing to give their lives in the service of a higher moral calling as 911 demonstrated. It follows that we need to speculate that the bombing/invasion of Afghanistan and supporting the rapacious Northern Alliance may do nothing more than replace one ugly dictatorship with another while turning an impoverished country into a major supplier of crushed stone. An attack may also serve to strengthen Bin Laden's movement - hardly the avowed intention of the Bush Administration.
What is the genesis of the Army of God? How does this vicious, vitriolic lot sustain itself, find funding and gather new adherents? How does Bin Laden focus and fuel the anger and sometime zealotry of millions of Muslims - particularly Arab Muslims? The answer to both questions may be the same.
Page Break
Any destructive, self-referential organization begins with a legitimate grievance that most people would regard with interest and concern, whatever position they might hold about it. Abortion is such an issue. No reasonable, ethically-informed person sees abortion as a good thing save in the most extreme circumstances. There are no pro abortionists outside the mental hospitals, only people who have concluded that the inalienable rights of women to have full jurisdiction over their own bodies always trumps the sorry reality of destroying a fetus. So argues pro choice. It is an ethical and reasoned argument made by people who are mindful of of the ambiguity of the problem and may dream of a world in which abortion would never be necessary. For the record, pro choice does not like abortion.
It follows that a passionate and well-informed leader can rally large numbers of reasonable, decent people who wish to speak out against abortion, petition doctors not to perform them, persuade their sisters to avoid them and lobby legislators to provide generous funding for adoption services, child welfare, day care, birth control education and widely available, preferably free contraception services.
It also follows that these leaders can and do attract the people of whom Pascal spoke - "...those bereft any sense of self worth, bearing the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable and bearing a hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults." These people seek a Holy Cause rather than social change. The Cause does not need them so much as they need the Cause to provide them with some sense of purpose and belonging. The Cause becomes the substitute self. This suicide of the psyche permits the birth of "Atomic Dog" a.k.a. Janes Kopp, the Army of God martyr/murderer. In time the James Kopps prevail, the reasonable and decent depart and the self-referential "higher morality emerges in all of its bloody excess. The original premises become distorted and extended to absurdity. The Army of God is now anti sex education, anti birth control and in large measure anti human sexuality. They back their bizarre beliefs with terror, murder and destruction.
The ascendancy of Bin Laden's movement is not so simple as that of the Army of God but there are compelling parallels. Bin Laden was born to wealth and privilege and yet migrated from wealthy playboy to cave-dwelling fundamentalist. His conversion has much to do with his diminished self worth juxtaposed with fundamentalist religious instruction and the presence of a cause that had some objective merit in his mind and the minds of many Arab Muslims. The cause centres on the long-standing marginalization and humiliation of the Arab people by the West (Balfour Declaration, the lies of Lawrence of Arabia, US manipulation of Saudi Arabia etc.) and even more by their own governments which are and have been theocratic dictatorships for centuries.
It did not help that Islam's world froze in place in the 16th century. While the West suffered its religious wars, the Reformation, the separation by degrees of Church and State and the explosive growth of literacy made possible by the printing press, the world of Islam maintained the status quo. The West became economically powerful, expansionist, imperialistic and adventurous and the scales were tipped forever against Islam's feudal states. It was almost 200 years post Gutenberg that the Mullahs permitted the mechanical printing of Arabic texts. What a deficit that was and so saddening when you consider Arab/Islam's Golden age (9th to 14th centuries approximately) when their societies were socially open and they were the faithful conservators of wisdom. Arab scholars advanced theoretical mathematics, produced stunningly beautiful poetry, embraced science, valued education and even lovingly preserved early Christian literature. In that golden time, the Arab/Muslim world epitomized civilization. Europe, not so much. When Bin Laden styles himself as a latter day Saladin, he is not simply being a megalomaniac. He knows his history, the genesis of Muslim anger and that pervasive sense of being scorned and made "lesser than" by a world that left them behind. He knows how to exploit this anger and empower martyrs who find comfort and strength in his voice, as do countless other Muslims suffering in a world that has passed them by. The latter have no urge to become terrorists but it does allow them to straighten their backs and regain the pride and sense of self so long denied them by historical circumstance and their own collective errors. Only a small percentage - the "Atomic Dogs" are moved to violence but that could amount to 20,000 worldwide. What then of America's morally understandable but wildly wrong-headed military responses? Is not George Bush making Bin Laden's case for him? Americans are justifiably madder than hell which unfortunately is not a good state of mind from which to try to solve a huge, ambiguous and frightening problem.
Page Break
Bin Laden's movement will endure a while. It is a mass movement with a core of utterly committed "Atomic Dogs" at the core and the wider support of millions who do not endorse extremism but relate to the broad message. These millions are not tacit supporters because they are genetically or culturally disposed to evil and violence but because they stand condemned to be "lesser then" in a complicated world not of their making. They need a Cause in order to feel like men and women in full.
Pascal predicted both Bin Laden and Atomic Dog. So did Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer (Harper & Collins). Although published nearly a century ago and written by an uneducated stevedore, it is a book for our times - a brilliant primer on the origins and nature of mass movements. Hoffer would argue that we misunderstand the Bin Laden movement at our peril. It is not an army for all that it has soldiers. It is not a rogue state for all that it has tacit support in many states. It has no place and no centre. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It has no timetable or deadlines. Its beginnings are centuries old and its patience is infinite. It is not exclusively religious, social or cultural in character although it may adopt any one of these labels as a cloak of convenience. Its aims are obscure (to us) and changeable. Its most frightening characteristic is that it is desperately needed my its members and supporters. Therein is its strength.
There is no military solution to the threat. America must attempt war by other means - something in which they have no useful experience.
"Mass movements are usually accused of doping their followers with hope of the future while cheating them of enjoyment of the present. Yet, to the frustrated, the present is irremediably spoiled. Comforts and pleasures cannot make it whole. No content or comfort can ever arise in their minds but from hope. Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. (Eric Hoffer)
Millionaire Bin Laden lives an acetic's life in an impoverished land and knows that one day his life is forfeit. What comforts him?
Several of the terrorists who visited carnage on New York and Washington had lived in the US and from all accounts engaged in the "good life" but martyrdom held greater appeal. A life of freedom and comfort could not make them whole. A grotesque act of terror could. And did.
"The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft...take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centred for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility is boundless.( Hoffer)
From what we know of young Atta, the lead hijacker/terrorist on 911, he was a quiet, geeky Momma's boy. Consider then the boundless vanity and self-adulation in his will and final instructions to his fellow terrorists.
"Man would fain be great and sees that he is little..."
The world of Islam has been made to feel little. Once proud Arabs feel little.
Enter Osama Bin Laden.
No, the world will not be the same again.
_________________________________________
If you have troubled to read this 9-year old article, please tell me - has the US; have we learned the first goddam thing about international terrorism in the intervening years? Do we really think that Bin Laden's death changes anything but Obama's poll numbers?
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