The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (41 page)

Nineteenth Century American leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Harrison
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handled similar problems by doing what Hussein did—exterminating Native American tribes or mounting internal wars against dissidents like the Mormons
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and the Southern Confederates. But it’s been over 110 years since a Yankee head of state has followed Hussein’s example and killed thousands to solve an internal conflict.

Moslem citizens of the Middle East are frequently encouraged by their leaders to take to the streets and to chant for the death of Americans, Israelis, and Jews. American students at military academies like West Point are also encouraged to shout “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
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—a chilling thought. But average civilians like you and me do not take to the streets screaming for the murder of others. Nor would we tolerate it if an organization arose that made such chants fashionable.

In writing about the dangers I believe that militant Islam poses to Western Civilization I am taking a chance on doing the very thing this book warns against—demonizing Islam’s warriors and using their menace to rally those who believe in pluralism, tolerance, and freedom of speech. I am trying to pull ancient superorganismic strings, bringing together those of us who believe in human rights by using an enemy. I’m calling forth the very superorganismic instincts whose workings I’m trying to reveal. But I believe with my very cells and marrow that if we do not rally, our Western rights and freedoms could easily disappear. Our human rights and the meme team that supports them have been around for a mere 225 years. Militant Islam has been around over six times as long. That’s a difference of over a thousand years! And the worldwide superorganism of Islam—its empire—has covered more territory than any other imperium in history, has held that territory for over 1,100 years, and has hooked itself into the minds of its conquered peoples with a permanence our memes have never achieved—despite the worldwide stretch of CNN and MTV.

Some enemies are false. They don’t exist. Some enemies are real. Which is militant Islam? I have to leave that judgement up to you.

When 9/11 hit America in 2001, many thought that Osama bin Laden’s role in the attack was a myth
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created by a right-wing religious administration hell bent on turning America into a theocratic police state.
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The World Trade Center, they said, had not been downed by al Qaeda.
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It had been destroyed from within by explosives planted by the CIA and by Israel’s Mossad.
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And the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon had never taken place.

Said Adam Curtis, the maker of a three-hour BBC documentary called
The Power of Nightmares
, “Beyond his small group, bin Laden had no formal organization, until the Americans invented one for him.”
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It’s true that we recruited Osama bin Laden as one of the 50,000 Middle Eastern “freedom fighters” we, the Saudis, and the Chinese trained and financed to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
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It’s also true that leaders like George W. Bush and those who come after him can pull together a people by manufacturing an enemy. But the instinct that tightens our unity when we’re threatened from outside evolved for a reason. Enemies are often real.

The evidence is substantial that whether or not he downed the World Trade Center, a real man, Osama bin Laden, threatened us in bulletins, manifestos, videotapes, DVDs, and television interviews, and that he started this anti-American crusade in the early 1990s. Bin Laden’s fans in the Islamic world believed in him. They credited him with turning the tide of a 200-year-long losing streak in Islam’s 1,350-year-old war against the West.

Bin Laden took credit on behalf of his God and of his fellow Jihadists for defeating one of the two Satanic Superpowers of the late 20th Century—The Soviet Union, first in the Afghan War of 1979 to 1989, then in the Velvet Revolutions that toppled what was left of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1989. Bin Laden also took credit on behalf of his God and of his fellow fighters for attacks on an even greater Satan—the United States. He spoke with pride of the destruction of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and of an attack on an American battleship in Yemen.
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And, most important of all, Osama took credit on behalf of his God and of Allah’s sacred fighters for the first major attack against America on U.S. home soil since the British burned Washington to the ground in the War of 1812. He took credit on behalf of his God and of his fellow fighters of Jihad for “the blessed day of New York”,
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the day, he says, when America’s “greatest buildings were destroyed” and the US was “full of fear”. He took credit on behalf of his God and of his fellow fighters of Jihad for the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center and of a substantial chunk of Washington’s Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

In October 2003, bin Laden explained how the fighters of jihad had toppled the elephantine Soviet Union by catching it in the quicksand of Afghanistan, then pricking it over and over until it bled into bankruptcy. Bin Laden said that the fighters of jihad intended to do the same thing to the United States…but this time in Iraq. Declared Bin Laden about the citizens of America and the West, “Never be afraid of their multitudes, for their hearts are empty while their strength has begun to weaken – militarily and economically. This was particularly true after the blessed day of New York, by the grace of Allah, when their losses reached more than one trillion dollars, following the attack and its aftermath. Moreover, they have had a budget deficit for the third consecutive year. This year, the deficit reached a record peak of more than US $4.5 billion. Praise be to Allah."”
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As Osama bin Laden says, our Federal deficits are soaring. On November 7, 2005, the American national debt was a staggering $8.066
trillion
dollars--over $108,400 for each family of four.
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The amount of money we've borrowed from the citizens of foreign countries is so awesome
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that we are now the biggest debtors since the prehistoric invention of the loan.
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Osama took credit on behalf of his fighters for this financial hemorrhage, one he hoped would lead to America’s downfall.

“
You are the soldiers of Allah, the arrows of Islam,” Osama continued in his message to what he called, “the heroes in Baghdad, the centre of the Caliphate” on October 19, 2003. “
So maintain the jihad.”
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Did the man behind these words exist? The Arab world’s equivalent to CNN, the Arabic satellite TV stations Al Jazeera and Al Arabia, aired portions of bin Laden’s video and audio tapes on a regular basis. A newspaper editor in Pakistan, Hamid Mir,
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made his career in the Islamic world by gaining regular access to bin Laden in al Qaeda safe houses and mountain hideouts. And in 2001 and 2002, Moslems everywhere from Nigeria to Indonesia drove 40 miles or more to buy posters in which bin Laden’s portrait was superimposed on photos of the World Trade Center burning and collapsing.
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In 2001, nine years after her analysis and two years before America alienated large portions of Islamic society when it jumped into the second Iraq War, Britain’s
The Guardian
reported that, “A Saudi intelligence survey of educated, professional Saudis concluded that 95% supported al-Qaeda’s cause [the cause of Osama bin Laden and of his wireless warriors].” Dr Ghazi al-Gosaibi, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Labor
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, told
The Guardian
, "If you go around the Muslim world, you will find the vast majority of people support Bin Laden."
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The message of the experts--
Abul Aziz Said, John L. Esposito, Edward Said, and Phebe Marr—was simple. Extremist Islam does not pose a threat to the West. Then came a series of
attacks in New York, London, and Madrid hinting that the claims of the experts were radically off base. Yet the claim that an Islamic enemy is an artificial creation, the product of a scare campaign mounted by a right wing American presidency, continues to pop up over and over again. Why?

Because the right wingers do, in fact, often benefit from the threat posed by militant Islam…no matter how real that threat. Companies in the Bush family’s clique--corporations like the mega-oil-services-and-construction corporation Halliburton
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and like the mega-engineering firm Bechtel
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--made money
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from America’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and from America’s two wars in Iraq. And American president George W. Bush used the public’s highly emotional reaction to 9/11 to boost his approval ratings.

But there’s another factor at work beneath the surface. The “Islamic-threats-are-phony” arguments are driven by a need rats, dogs, and humans share, the need for an illusion of control. The 9/11 conspiracy theorists and the post-9/11 Islamic apologists promoted the view that no one would dislike us if we simply rid ourselves of leaders like American president George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, or a cabal of neo-conservatives. And the folks on the far
right
were just as convinced that things would go much better for America if we could only rid ourselves of homosexual plotters, abortion supporters, promoters of evolution, and godless secularists. Both the right and the left push the notion that we can solve our problems and eliminate all threats by purging ourselves of our despicable neighbors. Both the right and the left promote the illusion that we have a button at our fingertips with which we can turn off our punishment.