S01E01 9-11 Flashcards
What is the Project for the new American century (think tank)
Letter written by a think tank in America addressed to Bill Clinton.
Urged President Bill Clinton, at that time, to invade Iraq and to start the process of democratising the entire Middle East.
toppling Saddam Hussein using Iraq then as a example of democracy in the Middle East.
eighteen signatories: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Jeb Bush, Kenneth Adelman, Richard Perle, William Kristol (Neo-con movement)
Who was Sayyid Qutb?
The sort of grandfather of modern jihadism. Famous Muslim brotherhood ideologue.
His writings inspired those who killed Sadat and then wanted to overthrow Mubarak.
His book called Fi Zilal al-Quran, which means “in the shades of the Qur’an.” … was written over nine years period, because it covers the entire Qur’an. It’s – it’s – it’s a commentary on the Qur’an. But not from a theological sense, but from a literary sense, from an inspirational sense.
And he wrote that book, four thousand pages when he was in prison, over nine years. And Nasser’s prisons in Egypt in the 1950s and ’60s were no picnic. I mean, they were exceptionally hard, harsh, dark prisons.
Who was Egyptian Jemaah Islamiyah?
He killed Sadat in 1981 because of the fact that he signed the peace treaty with Israel.
Who is the Mahdi?
Well, the Mahdi means “the guided one.” He’s a saviour who would emerge to reunite the Muslim world. But the Muslim world the unification will trigger the return or the emergence of the antichrist, you know, who will lead the Jews and the Zionist Christians in a battle against Muslims, which will basically then, you know, lead to the descent of Jesus into this world in order to end this conflict on the side of Muslims.
Around how many were killed in 9/11?
3,000
Who was the mastermind of 9/11?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
he’s a highly gifted engineer
saw American consumerism as part of the capitalist evil, the entire global economic system and banking system is run, according to them and their conspiracy theories, run by the Jews, the Zionists, and it’s all done in a manner of usury, in an imperial way.
Khalid Sheikh actually came from an area in Pakistan called Balochistan famous for its, you know, deeply socialist leanings, but also almost communist. In fact, in the 1960s and ’70s, they used to call Balochistan the Red Balochistan.
How many hijackers were there in 9/11?
fifteen hijackers, most of them did not know they were in a suicide mission and most of them did not know until just a week before that they were going to hijack planes. But that’s it. They were not told that the planes actually are going to be used as suicidal weapons. Only the pilots and the maybe two or three of the leaders of the hijackers who were told that it’s going to be a suicide mission
How many members of the al-Qaeda’s Shura council?
council of twenty top men,
Who pioneered the lone wolf attack? (The lone wolf jihad. The individual jihad)
Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, who’s one of the greatest strategic minds of the jihadist movement
Abu Mus’ab al-Suri remains the foremost theoretician in the global jihadist movement today, despite his capture in Pakistan in late 2005. After having participated in the founding of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 1988, al-Suri, whose real name is Mustafa Sethmarian Nasar, trained a whole generation of young jihadis at his camps in Afghanistan. When he moved back to Spain in the early 1990s, al-Suri took part in establishing Al-Qaeda networks in Europe. In the mid-1990s, he rose to prominence in jihadi circles as editor of the London-based bulletin of the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armee, the most deadly Islamist terrorist group operating in Europe at the time. Al-Suri later formed his own media centre and training camp in Taleban-ruled Afghanistan, to which he returned in 1998. Building on his extensive military experience from the Syrian Islamist insurgency in the early 1980s, he contributed decisively to formulating Al-Qaeda’s global warfare strategy. Throughout his writings there is a desire to learn from past mistakes and rectify the course of the jihadi movement. His 1,600 page masterpiece, ‘The Global Islamic Resistance Call’, outlines a broad strategy for the coming generation of Al-Qaeda, with a keen eye for the practical implementation of jihadi guerrilla warfare theories. His ideas of how to maximise the political impact of jihadi violence and how to build autonomous cells for ‘individualised terrorism’ have inspired many jihadi militants of today. The book includes a translation of two key chapters from al-Suri’s seminal work ‘The Global Islamic Resistance Call’.
What are the two al-Qaeda programs?
First, destroy and then rebuild. They were good at destroy. They are never good at rebuilding.
Creative disruption or creative destruction. In fact, they called it creative chaos.
Who was Mustafa Abu al-Yazid?
Mustafa Abu al-Yazid became the operational leader of al-Qaeda and who was killed, I think, in 2009, was a member of the Shura council of Al-Qaeda.
How was the program of Creative Destruction relevant to 9/11?
The attack the World Trade Center in effect by writing huge graffiti in the sky —”Come attack us here in Afghanistan” - Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.
The Soviet Union reached its end in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is going to entice the United States to reach its end in Afghanistan as well.
Imagine that you have a house. It’s dilapidated. You know, you want to destroy it. You want to build bulldoze it. But there is a problem: You’re broke and you don’t have a bulldozer. So, what do you do then? Well, in the village, there is, you know, someone who owns a bulldozer, and he’s an idiot and someone who has short temper and easily provoked. So, what do you do then? You, you know—. You don’t have even the money to hire a bulldozer. You can’t pay for his services. So, what do you do? You write a lot of, you know, rude graffiti on the house, insulting him and his wife and his mother and his daughter and everything. And then, basically, he will come and destroy it for you for free. For free.
What happened at the end of the movie “The Living Daylights”?
In 1989, Timothy Dalton’s classic, The Living Daylights, one of the great James Bond movies, came out. At the end of that movie, James Bond becomes a Mujahid. He becomes a jihadist. Joins this ragtag group of Muslim warriors—fighting this nefarious plot by a renegade Soviet general in line with a renegade American arms dealer to sell opium. I was very confused. But there you see James Bond riding – riding into battle with the Mujahideen.
What is Mujahideen?
Mujahideen, or Mujahidin is the plural form of mujahid (Arabic: مجاهد, romanized: mujāhid, lit. ’strugglers or strivers, doers of jihād’), an Arabic term that broadly refers to people who engage in jihad (lit. ’struggle or striving [for justice, right conduct, Godly rule, etc.]’), interpreted in a jurisprudence of Islam as the fight on behalf of God, religion or the community (ummah).
The widespread use of the word in English began with reference to the guerrilla-type militant groups led by the Islamist Afghan fighters in the Soviet–Afghan War (see Afghan mujahideen). The term now extends to other jihadist groups in various countries such as Myanmar (Burma), Cyprus, and the Philippines.
Why is the film Rambo III relevant to Afghanistan?
In Rambo III (1988), Rambo becomes one of the Mujahideen as well. And at that last shot, he’s riding his Mujahideen horse up against a whole battalion of tanks, Soviet tanks, all by himself. The – the Mujahideen were the great heroes, and the film ends with the dedication to the brave men of the Mujahideen.
Some claim the credit at the end of the film was changed to “This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan”, after the 9/11 attacks due to the Mujahideen’s connections to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the group who claimed responsibility for the attacks on the US. That very claim has carried a lot of credibility over the years and has even cropped up in a book called Fictions of War by Tatiana Prorokova.
