yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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?

[music playing]

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.

[non-english singing]

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.

[non-english speech]

More Articles

View All
15 Signs You’re Mentally Strong
Resilience is the primary difference between those who make it in life and those who don’t. Life has its ups and downs; it’s just how it goes. Those who are able to pursue their goals despite an overwhelming amount of pushback earn their future. Nobody ha…
LearnStorm at Wewahitchka High School
We will hitch high schools. Have a great little school here. It’s a rural area, about 350 kids, 7 through 12. A great school, though our kids are interested in bettering themselves. Miss Camden Topman is a reading ELA teacher here, English Language Arts…
Money: Humanity's Biggest Illusion
If I asked you the question, “What is man’s greatest invention?” what would your answer be? There’s a lot of options. Would it be fire because it gives us warmth, protection, and the ability to cook our meals? Or perhaps you would pick the wheel because i…
AI for Digital SAT prep
All right, everybody! Well, we are going to take time to now introduce, uh, myself as the host and then I’ll let my amazing panelists go ahead and introduce themselves. So nice to meet you! My name is Danielle Sullivan. I am Senior Manager of District Par…
Capturing the Iditarod - Behind the Scenes | Life Below Zero
We are here to document the lives of people living in Alaska. The harsh reality is the environment we’re up against. It makes it tough to do our job. Working on Life Below Zero can be very dangerous. Guns here, cameras; you never know what to expect. You …
3d curl intuition, part 2
So where we left off, we had this two-dimensional vector field V, and I have it pictured here as kind of a yellow vector field. I just stuck it in three dimensions in kind of an awkward way where I put it on the XY plane and said, “Pretend this is in thre…