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["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/islam/blis_extrem_binladen.htm<http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/islam/blis_extrem_binladen.htm>
Osama bin Laden's Goals

Waging War on the West

"Many Americans seem to think that bin Laden is just a violent cult leader. 
But the truth is that he is tapping into a minority Islamic tradition with a 
wide following and a deep history." -Michael Doran, professor of Near Eastern 
Studies at Princeton University 

What does Osama bin Laden want, and why does he want it? These questions can 
best be answered by studying the development of this tradition of Islamic 
extremism in the Middle East, especially since World War II. Although these 
fundamentalist groups preach a theology which values the earliest traditions 
of Islam, it remains nevertheless a very modern movement which has achieved 
broad popularity, especially among like-minded thinkers who have created what 
has become known as "Islamism." 

Many devout Muslims are aghast at the idea that their faith is being used to 
justify terrorism, yet they must understand that bin Laden and the people 
like him are not simply strange aberrations: they are, instead, a natural 
extension of extremist theology which has been in development since at least 
the 1930s, and in some cases well before that. 

Bin Laden's personal history can be easily found on the internet. Born to a 
rich Saudi family, he became in the 1980s the prime financier for an 
organization that recruited Muslims from mosques around the world for the war 
in Afghanistan. When he returned after the war, he founded an organization to 
aid that war's veterans, many of whom went on to fight elsewhere (like 
Bosnia) and/or comprised the basis of his al-Qaeda terrorist group. 

So what is it that bin Laden wants today? His basic argument is that Muslims 
in the Middle East are currently suffering from political, social and 
economic deprivation for the simple reason that their governments have not 
fully implemented shari'a , or Islamic law. Because their rulers have failed 
to do this, bin Laden no longer considers them to be truly Muslim. 

So, he would claim, rather than living in Islamic states, Muslims in the 
Middle East are really living in jahiliyya , an Arabic term used to describe 
pre-Islamic paganism, ignorance and barbarism. Muslims are forbidden to make 
war on each other, but they are allowed to make war on non-Muslims who are 
persecuting them - thus current rulers are made open to attack. But they 
aren't the only targets, because these leaders are not solely responsible for 
the current state of affairs. 

On the contrary, Muslims are victims of a centuries-long Crusade by Jews and 
Westerners which has been driven by the goal of undermining and eventually 
destroying Islam. They colonized Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam, those 
lands under Muslim administration), divided it up into nation-states, and 
even left people there to rule over the Holy City of Jerusalem (Israel). 

Some Westerners, including President Clinton, have argued that the West does 
not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. 
Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise, especially to 
Islamic extremists. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both 
Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's 
Other. The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and 
Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon 
compared with the continuing and deeply conflicted relation between Islam and 
Christianity. (Huntington, p. 209) 

This is not to say, of course, that this is a conflict simply against the 
religion of Islam. Western leaders are correct in that they have not launched 
an armed conflict against a religion. But Muslim leaders are correct in that 
an attack is being made against a cultural, historical and political 
civilization centered around the religion of Islam. 

Currently, Westerners are perceives as attempting to impose their own secular 
values which are at odds with fundamental and traditonal Islamic values and 
practices. They claim altruistic motives, but Muslims know the real purpose 
is to undermine their faith. Thus, the West must be resisted and attacked. 
Some think that because the West is the bigger enemy, it should be attacked 
first, whereas others believe that the local rulers, being the closer enemy, 
should be the top priority. 

Such would bin Laden argue, yet none of this originates with him. All reports 
indicate that he isn't much of an original thinker - he is neither a 
religious scholar nor a political philosopher. Instead, he has tapped into a 
fully-formed tradition which has given him all the ideological tools he needs 
to both explain current problems and offer a solution. Muslims in the Middle 
East can accept these arguments because the ground has already been prepared 
by centuries of development.