Using Religion As A Tool | Bin Laden’s Hard Drive

MAN: It's impossible to understand Bin Laden without reference to his religious beliefs. This was a guy who, when he was a teenager, was praying seven times a day, fasting twice a week. On the other hand, he was also a mass murderer. What was his relationship to religion?

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Given how religious Bin Laden saw himself, it's not a surprise there's a lot of religious material on these drives. How great is our last panel, [inaudible]... [non-english singing]

MAN: He would often recite verses from the Quran in his letters. He would refer to sayings of the prophet Muhammad in his speeches. He thinks he's religious. He thinks he was doing the right thing. But he was not a religious authority. He was not a graduate of a seminary or any kind of traditional religious training. And so we have someone who's a non-specialist making unorthodox interpretations of the faith, because he actually starts by acknowledging that Islam prohibits the killing of noncombatants in warfare, but then goes on to explain, in his mind, why the political situation that we are living in allows him to violate that rule. What he did was to use political justifications to violate a religious edict.

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MAN: This homemade video found on the hard drives begins, as many of these al-Qaeda videos do, by quoting a religious verse with chanting in tandem, and then the message becomes clearer. We hit the United States, and we scared them. Then inevitably, Bin Laden himself speaks, preaching to his followers. And I think it's a really telling piece of propaganda, how it weaves together religious imagery to superimpose them on the tactics and actions of al-Qaeda. This homemade propaganda was crude. But tragically, it was also effective. He was using religion as a tool.

[non-english singing]

It's a means to control people, to make people do whatever you want them to do. And the ends justify the means, like any psychopath can justify anything. I mean, at one point, he actually told his commanders, don't shy away from shedding blood. You know, if you look at the crusade, do you think Christianity is a crusade? No. The same thing-- it's people using religion to obtain political goals.

I think it's tragic that we let a criminal define the religion of 1.8 billion people. We would never take the word of the KKK to define Christianity. It would be ludicrous. It would be offensive. If the Quran is a recipe book and it called for a tablespoon of sugar in the recipe, and extremists would read that and put a cup of sugar instead-- so taking what the Quran says and taking it to its extreme. Bin Laden didn't do that. He read in the Quran, you need a tablespoon of sugar. And instead, he put a cup of cyanide. That's not an extremist. That's a deviant revisionist.

Bin Laden's view of his religion and violence extended to his own family. Terrorism was the family calling, and he was willing to sacrifice even those closest to him for his self-styled holy war.

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