The Looming Tower
“Bin Laden would greet them, and then al-Qaeda trainees would begin their courses in terrorism. Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam—pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics—would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into ...action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of al-Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.Given the diversity of the trainees and their causes, bin Laden’s main task was to direct them toward a common enemy.MoreLess
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