by Eboo Patel
When the pictures of the nineteen hijackers were published, I saw a deeper layer to Roy’s comment. I remember staring for a long time at the photographs of the terrorists, searching their faces for signs of dementia or marks of evil. But for the most part, they looked unsettlingly normal, perhaps even a little naive, more like the faces in a high school yearbook than on a Wanted poster. I was surprised that only a couple had facial hair. Wouldn’t they want to be pictured with regulation-size beards so that at least they could look the part of jihadis? After all, their mentors Mohammed Haydar Zammar and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed each had a bush of menacing-looking facial hair. And then it occurred to me: the reason the pictures resembled those in a high school yearbook was that some of these murderers were barely out of their teens. Maybe some did not have full beards because they could not grow them.
I remembered Yigal Amir, the extremist Jew who assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. I thought back to 1997, when a member of the Christian Identity movement named Benjamin Smith went on a shooting rampage across the Midwest, targeting Jews, Asians, and African Americans. Twenty-six and twenty-one years old, respectively. I thought about the news reports I heard consistently about religious violence in India, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, West Africa, wherever. The ages of the people doing most of the fighting, killing, and dying were generally between fifteen and thirty. The world had recently woken up to the increasing link between religion and violence. But there was something else going on that most people seemed to be missing: the shock troops of religious extremism were young people.
I was starting the Interfaith Youth Core because I thought young people could be a major force in building religious cooperation, and I was having a hard time getting anybody to pay attention. Even people within the small interfaith movement generally treated young people’s involvement as a sideshow. But religious extremists didn’t view young people as an afterthought. Religious extremists saw a fire in young people that others were missing. They were stoking that fire and turning it into targeted assassinations and mass murder. In my mind, I was picturing a movement of young people working for religious understanding through cooperative service. In my newspapers, I kept reading about teenagers and twentysomethings killing other people in the name of God. Their movement was strong and growing. I began to investigate why.
Osama bin Laden started his terrorist career as a teenager at Al Thagher Model School in Saudi Arabia, where wealthy Saudis send their children for a Western-style education. Young Saudi princes and the sons of the business elite dress in gray slacks and charcoal blazers and assemble every morning for a military-style call to order, then gather again to perform the ritual ablutions before the noon prayer. The teachers at Al Thagher include both Westerners and Arabs, some of whom have been exiled from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria for their involvement in political activities, particularly with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Founded in Egypt in 1928 by a twenty-two-year-old named Hassan al-Banna under the slogan “Islam is the solution,” the Muslim Brotherhood has been called the precursor of contemporary radical Islam. Some have argued that its original intention was to be a religious revival movement that provided social services and community for the rapidly changing society of postcolonial Egypt. But Egypt’s secular nationalist ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, who took power in 1952, radicalized its leadership through his brutal crackdowns. The most influential of those leaders was Sayyid Qutb, whom Nasser imprisoned and ultimately executed. Qutb developed the idea that true Muslims are required to wage war against impious regimes and replace them with “authentic” Muslim leadership. This notion became the rallying cry of radical Muslims and remains one of the guiding lights of Muslim totalitarians today.
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia knew that many of the Arab exiles in his country were influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. He let them in because he felt they had been unfairly persecuted, but he was no more tolerant of open political activity than other Arab leaders. Those who remained committed to the totalitarian vision of the Muslim Brotherhood had to organize clandestinely. They had to find ripe targets for the message of radical Islam. They were looking for people with time on their hands, a desire to make an impact, and the ability to grow the movement. The perfect targets: young people. The perfect venues: schools.
Osama bin Laden’s fellow students describe the young Osama as honest and honorable. He did not cheat; he did not steal from other students; he kept to himself. He was about fourteen when a physical education teacher at Al Thagher, a tall Syrian in his late twenties, started an afterschool Islamic study group. He procured the keys to the sports equipment and promised the students an opportunity to play soccer if they joined his club. The teacher was athletic and charismatic, an Arab and a Muslim like most of the students. They admired him and wanted to be around him. They joined his club in droves.
At first he had the students memorize passages of the Qur’an, then some of the stories of the Prophet’s life. Gradually, the teacher began telling other stories. “It was mesmerizing,” a student in the club confessed to The New Yorker’s Steve Coll. He described one story that the teacher told in detail. It was about a young Muslim boy who wanted to please God but found his father standing in the way. The boy located his father’s gun—and here the teacher went into excruciating detail about the preparations made by the boy, from developing the plot to loading the gun—and killed the old man.
“I watched the other boys,” Osama’s former classmate recounted, “fourteen-year-old boys, their mouths open.” He found a way to get out. But others, including Osama, only became more devoted to the sessions. They grew mullah-length beards and began telling their schoolmates that true Muslims were required to restore Islamic law across the Middle East by any means necessary.
At university, Osama fell under the spell of another radical, charismatic teacher, Abdullah Azzam. A Palestinian who had joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a young man and later helped found Hamas, Azzam wanted to find a way to make Sayyid Qutb’s vision of the violent overthrow of corrupt regimes a reality. “Jihad and the rifle alone,” he wrote. “No negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues.” He saw the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as his opportunity to bring the warrior ethic back to Islam.
Azzam traveled around the world to spread his message, raising money and recruiting young people to join the armed effort. He opened dozens of recruitment centers, known as services offices. If Sayyid Qutb’s innovation was that true Muslims must overthrow unjust regimes, Azzam’s breakthrough was building an international network that focused on a concrete cause, Afghanistan. He was the founder of the global jihad.
Osama bin Laden was one of the first to answer Azzam’s call. At the age of twenty-three, he was financing Azzam’s Peshawar Services Office. Peshawar, located in Pakistan near the Afghan border, was Grand Central Station for young Muslims looking for action in Afghanistan. It was here that bin Laden met a bookish young doctor from a prominent Cairo family, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The two were both struck by the range, quantity, and commitment of Muslim youths pouring into Peshawar, eager to wage jihad. Like entrepreneurs, they realized the potential of this massive market of young Muslims for the product of totalitarian Islam. Zawahiri wrote:
The Muslim youths in Afghanistan waged the war to liberate Muslim land under purely Islamic slogans … It also gave young Muslim mujahidin—Arabs, Pakistanis, Turks and Muslims from Central and East Asia—a great opportunity to get acquainted with each other on the land of Afghan jihad through their comradeship-at-arms against the enemies of Islam.
Most of these young people never saw action. Afghan commanders were justifiably wary of mixing foreign youths, some the spoiled children of wealthy donors to the jihad, in with seasoned Afghan warriors. The result was an international network of Muslim youths schooled in the ideology of totalitarian Islam, taught to hate the imperialist infidel, and trained to kill without being given the opportunity to do so. And that is who became Al Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden is, as Bruce Lawrence notes in his introduction to Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, many things to many people: public enemy number one in the West, anti-imperialist hero to some in the Muslim world, polemicist extraordinaire. But there is an oft-overlooked dimension to bin Laden’s personality, a talent that is absolutely central to his macabre success: he is a brilliant youth organizer. He undoubtedly remembers the heat he felt when he first heard the story that the organizer of the Islamic club at Al Thagher told about a young person so pure that he was willing to do anything to please God, even kill his father. When bin Laden had his chance, he took it. He went to Peshawar and put his money, and later his life, on the line so that the infidel Soviets would be expelled from what God meant to be Muslim land. And he was not the only one. Many youths arrived, so young they could barely grow a regulation-length beard, ready to die so that Islam might live. Imagine what they could do if they were organized.
A statement that bin Laden released to the Arab news organization Al Jazeera in December 2001 provides a textbook example of how a skilled totalitarian engages young people in religious violence. In it, he tells the story of a boy who discovers that an animal is blocking a monk’s path. (It takes only a basic literary imagination to view the animal as America and the monk as the Muslim world.) The boy kills the animal with a rock. “My son, today you are better than me,” the monk says to him. Bin Laden follows this story up with the following commentary:
God Almighty lit up this boy’s heart with the light of faith, and he began to make sacrifices for the sake of “There is no god but God.” This is a unique and valuable story which the youth of Islam are waiting for their scholars to tell them, which would show the youth that these [the 9/11 attackers] are the people who have given up everything for the sake of “There is no god but God.”
Then bin Laden tells a story of how the Prophet’s uncle Hamza bin Abd al-Muttalib, who also served as the first military commander of the Muslim community, killed an unjust imam. In this way, he cites a historical figure that Muslims consider a hero and claims that this man’s heroism came from his violence. “He won a great victory … God Almighty raised him up to the status of lord of the martyrs,” bin Laden says of al-Muttalib.
Next bin Laden extols the virtues of the 9/11 hijackers:
God opened the way for these young men … these heroes, these true men, these great giants who erased the shame from the forehead of our umma … to tell America, the head of global unbelief, and its allies, that they are living in falsehood. They sacrificed themselves for “There is no god but God.”
And finally he makes the call: “The youth should strive to find the weak points of the American economy and strike the enemy there.”
Just as a skilled totalitarian youth organizer convinced a young Osama to answer the call of jihad through stories of the power of youths to return the ummah to glory, so bin Laden is doing the same for this generation. But Muslims are not the only ones lured into religious extremism by charismatic youth organizers.
“There (is) nothing holier than a terrorist underground.” So writes Yossi Klein Halevi in Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, a textbook example of how a young person becomes involved with religious extremism.
Reared in New York during the 1960s on his father’s stories of surviving the Holocaust by living in a hole, Halevi became convinced that the world was maniacally arrayed against the Jews. The motto “Esau the Goy hates Jacob the Jew” was the central organizing principle of his life. And everywhere he turned, there was a Jewish organization dedicated to helping him transform that idea into extremist action.
There was Betar, the youth movement of Revisionist Zionism. Yossi was first drawn in by the uniforms that its young initiates wore—blue with a yellow patch on the upper sleeve depicting a map of Israel that included all of Jordan. He started attending Sunday meetings at the organization’s basement headquarters, gathering with two dozen other preteen Jews to listen to lectures on the imperative to learn war. He absorbed Revisionist Zionism’s alternative version of the Holocaust, which blamed mainstream Jewish leaders for essentially paving the path to Auschwitz because of their refusal to become militant. He became convinced that Jewish survival depended on his generation becoming soldiers.
Betar summer camp indoctrinated him further. The youths sang songs about going to war and killing Arabs. They heard stories of young Jewish martyrs such as Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim, who had gone calmly to their hanging for assassinating Lord Moyne, the British colonial minister for the Middle East, in 1944.
A tough junior counselor named Danny took young Yossi under his wing, handing him a gun and shouting “Mazel tov” (Congratulations) when the bullet he fired hit the target. The lesson in hand-to-hand combat came after Yossi confessed he had never punched anyone in the face. Danny took off his glasses and said, “Hit me.” For Yossi, it was another example of the sacrifice that Betaris would make in training one of their own to become a warrior.
One of his happiest childhood moments was being initiated into Betar. He donned the blue uniform with the yellow patch; stood at attention during a ritual where the American, Israeli, and Betar flags were lowered; and sang the Betar anthem: “From the pit of decay and dust, / With blood and sweat, / A race will arise / Proud, generous and fierce.”
In addition to the Betar movement, Yossi imbibed a steady diet of extremist Jewish literature. In school he was assigned the children’s magazine Olomeinu (Our World), where he read the story of a young Jew who is kidnapped by a Christian nurse and forced to become a priest. One night the boy hears Hebrew songs coming from a synagogue, enters to find his parents sitting inside, and returns to his true self.
Yossi’s family received the Jewish Press at home, which turned every sideways glance at a Jew into a cry of potential genocide and a call for Jews to become militant. According to the Jewish Press, Germans were systematically destroying Jewish memory by vandalizing the community’s cemeteries, Hitler had been reincarnated in America in the guise of George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, and a holocaust was already under way in American cities, characterized not by gas chambers but by friendships between Jews and non-Jews. The stories became Yossi’s lens on the world. He imagined swastikas etched everywhere and became obsessed with Rockwell’s travel schedule. He dreamed of infiltrating the American Nazi Party, destroying it from the inside, and warning his people of the constant need to be vigilant and armed. He swallowed aspirin without water, practicing for the time he would need to do the same with cyanide.
It was the late 1960s, and everywhere Yossi turned young people fed up with the world were taking matters into their own hands. In the Bay Area, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton started the Black Panther Party, promising funerals for police officers who harassed African Americans. Radical white youths had the Weather Underground, who set off bombs to protest America’s involvement in Vietnam. Who was protecting Jews who were being beat up in Brooklyn and the Bronx? Yossi wondered. Why was the oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union consigned to the back pages?
When a dozen Jews were arrested in Russia in June 1970, mainstream Jewish organizations were anemic in their response and contemptuous toward youth involvement. “We gave two thousand dollars last year to the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry,” the foreign affairs expert at the Anti-Defamation League told Yossi and a group of his activist friends.
“Out of your budget of how many millions?” one of them retorted.
“You kids don’t know what you want,” was the dismissive answer.
“We don’t take direction from you,” said the president of Hadassah, another mainstream Jewish organization. “Youth have no right to come here.”
The one organization that cared about the fate of Soviet Jewry and involved young people, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), seemed increasingly lost and powerless. The vigil the group held to raise awareness about the recent arrests drew fewer tha
n fifty people and almost no media.
Only Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League (JDL) understood the frustrated passions of young American Jews, nurtured on the horrors of the Holocaust and the heroes of Israel’s founding, longing to carve out a place in Jewish history. Raised in Brooklyn, trained by Betar, delusional and messianic, Kahane was a brilliant organizer of young people. He knew that the energy building within young American Jews was on the brink of explosion. The arrests in the Soviet Union provided a convenient vehicle for Kahane to communicate his larger worldview—that Jewish survival depended on dominating others with force. Jews had suffered enormously because previous generations had ignored the message. At rallies, Kahane taunted mainstream Jewish leaders for being “nice Irvings” who allowed the Holocaust to happen because they were more interested in respectability than militancy. Yossi Halevi and his generation vowed never to make that mistake. Kahane became their pied piper. They loved his carefully cultivated image of self-sacrificial militant commitment to the cause of Jewish survival, his call for “a thousand young Jews ready to go over the barricade,” and his willingness to be at the front of the line.
While other Jewish organizations did little in response to the arrest of Soviet Jews, the JDL organized dramatic actions. Kahane and twenty others entered the Soviet trade office in Manhattan and threatened the staff with lead pipes. They disrupted concerts by Russian performers in New York, chained themselves to the wheels of a Soviet airliner at JFK airport, and destroyed property at the Soviet UN mission. JDL rallies attracted hundreds of young Jews, raising their fists and repeating after Kahane, “Two Russians for every Jew.”