Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. Part 5 is here. Jihadists remain ultimately faithful to Islam and not to any alliance, however momentarily beneficial, with anyone who does not share the jihadist vision of establishing an all-encompassing Islamic theocracy. This lesson recurs throughout Egyptian history as Lawrence Wright’s […]
Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: The Deprived Jihadist Myth (Part 5)
Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. Al Qaeda recruits “who came to train in Afghanistan in the 1990s were not impoverished social failures,” observed Lawrence Wright in his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. In the twenty-fifth anniversary year of Al Qaeda’s September […]
Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: Osama bin Laden, Out of Islam’s Past (Part 4)
Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Osama bin Laden habitually invoked “images that were deeply meaningful to many Muslims and practically invisible to those who were unfamiliar with the faith,” wrote Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. As bin Laden’s Al Qaeda attacks of September […]
Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: The Savage Wars of Jihad (Part 3)
Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. “Death on a grand scale was a goal in itself. There was no attempt to spare innocent lives, since the concept of innocence was subtracted from al-Qaeda’s calculations.” wrote Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The twenty-fifth anniversary year of the mother […]
Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: Jihadist Justifications (Part 2)
Part 1 is here. “The Quran is full of references to jihad,” wrote Lawrence Wright in his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Now that September 11, 2001, the terrorist day of infamy forever known as 9/11, has reached its twenty-fifth anniversary, it is instructive to review jihadist […]
Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: Back to the Future with Islam (Part 1)
September 11, 2001, a fateful day that infamously entered history as 9/11, has just marked its twenty-fifth anniversary, an appropriate time to look again at Lawrence Wright’s seminal work, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Among other things, this Pulitzer Prize-winning book written in 2006 offers critical insight into the minds of […]
Rutgers University Professors Bash ‘Privileged’ Jews
American Jews enjoy and suffer from, respectively, “white privileging and white fragility,” stated Sahar Aziz, director of Rutgers University Center for Security, Race, and Rights (CSRR), during its February 21 webinar. While Jews in America and beyond face a global surge in antisemitism following Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023, attack upon Israel, CSRR and its […]
Rutgers Prof Noura Erakat: ‘Zionism Is Based on Racial Elimination’
“There’s not enough at this moment to support the charge of genocide” brought against Israel, said George Washington University international affairs and political science professor Michael N. Barnett during a January 18 webinar. His comment marked a fleeting rational moment to a discussion of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) charges against Israel otherwise marked by the panel’s Israel-hatred […]
Chas Freeman’s Anti-Israel Fanaticism
“The Nazis at least had a sense enough of a sense of shame and guilt that they tried to conceal what they were doing. The Israelis are completely open about” their treatment of Palestinians, stated recently retired American diplomat Chas W. Freeman, Jr. Such an outrageous Holocaust inversion comparison of the Jewish state of Israel […]
Rashid Khalidi’s Happy Dhimmi Jews
“The idea that Jews in the Arab countries have always been subject to persecution culminating in their being forced to flee from the Arab countries is fundamentally false,” stated Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi in a December 14 webinar. Thus, this Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) propagandist […]