An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

  I have a conversation with Pierre Rehov, an Algerian French Israeli filmmaker who has gone undercover to film terrorists on the West Bank and in Gaza.

  “Look,” he points out. “These guys are young and testosterone-laden men who are denied sex with women. They think they can only get that in paradise with seventy-two virgins. They are so sexually frustrated that they are willing to die to get laid.”

  “Yes, you have a point,” I say, “but I have an additional observation. You know that bin Laden’s father had fifty-seven children. My guess is that bin Laden was starved for paternal attention and approval—and he therefore became a charismatic ‘father figure’ to other, similarly father-deprived young men. Such deprivation in a savagely patriarchal culture may render young men particularly vulnerable to a bin Laden–like serial killer by proxy. In Afghanistan I had witnessed the competition between sons for a father’s attention and favor. Abdul-Kareem and his brothers were constantly vying with one another in an attempt to secure positions within the family, which could be granted only by the patriarch, Ismail Mohammed.”

  Osama bin Laden’s son Omar published a book with his mother, Najwa bin Laden, and the author Jean Sasson. The book is titled Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World. Najwa was Osama’s first cousin as well as his first wife. They married when she was fifteen and he was seventeen.

  Omar tells us that what enraged Osama and set the wheels of 9/11 in motion was that Saudi Arabia had allowed America to come to the defense of Kuwait in 1990.

  The elder bin Laden was “offended by the sight of a mainly Christian western army defending their [Muslim] honor.” Bin Laden coveted that honor for himself. His warriors had successfully fought the Soviets. Why not choose him and his men? Infidel male soldiers were bad enough, but, Omar writes, “At the first sight of a capable-looking female soldier my father became the most outspoken opponent of the royal decision to allow western armies into the kingdom, ranting, ‘Women! Defending Saudi men!’”

  Most Westerners utterly fail to understand the importance of woman’s subordination in terms of Islamist male psychology.

  According to Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby, the splinter Muslim Brotherhood group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat “undertook their plot not only or even primarily because of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. . . . Rather, they considered the work on women’s rights championed by Sadat’s wife, Jihan, an existential threat to true Muslim society.”

  There are men (and women) who view woman’s freedom as so dangerous that they are ready to imprison, torture, and kill on a massive scale in order to stamp it out. Many Westerners refuse to believe that this is true or that what happens in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, or Afghanistan has anything to do with their lives in Europe or North America.

  They are wrong.

  The year 1979 was as much a turning point as 9/11 was.

  On November 4, 1979, Khomeini’s Islamists stormed the American embassy in Teheran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days.

  Something else happened in 1979.

  On November 20 five hundred transnational dissident Wahabi

  Islamists, led by a Saudi named Juhayman al-Otayei, stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca and held it for two weeks. They took hundreds of hostages. The Saudi king bartered away his modernization initiatives in order to receive the religious permission necessary to launch a countermilitary action at Islam’s holiest site. This included having French soldiers supply poison gas and help craft the plan of attack.

  When it was over, 127 Saudi soldiers were dead and 451 had been wounded. During the fighting 87 dissidents died at the scene and 27 in hospitals shortly thereafter. Of those who survived, 63 were beheaded in the public squares of eight Saudi cities.

  The twenty-two-year-old bin Laden was outraged at how the Saudis handled this Wahabi takeover, which Khomeini promptly dubbed an “American-Zionist conspiracy.”

  Bin Laden was incensed by the treachery of Muslims who had called upon infidels for help. He would make it his mission to fund and train Muslim fighters against the infidels. And he did so in Afghanistan.

  In the 1980s, while bin Laden was arming and fighting alongside the mujahideen, in separate incidents Iranian, Palestinian, and Libyan commandos bombed American embassies and Marine barracks, hijacked planes, blew up European synagogues and nightclubs, and exploded Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

  In the 1990s Iran’s Hezbollah, al-Qaeda’s Saudis, and Palestinians joined together and exploded a bomb-laden truck outside the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing American soldiers and wounding hundreds of civilians; in 1998 al-Qaeda detonated two car bombs simultaneously, destroying the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 and wounding thousands of civilians.

  Islamists everywhere blew up hotels, ships, tourist buses, nightclubs, churches, synagogues, mosques, airports, trains, and shopping malls, and both Muslim and infidel civilians on every continent.

  Something awful also happened in New York City.

  In the early 1980s a blind Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was implicated in the successful plot to assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Abdel-Rahman was jailed, tortured, and eventually expelled from Egypt. Following his expulsion, Abdel-Rahman went to Afghanistan to work with Osama bin Laden, who was aiding the mujahideen in their resistance against Soviet occupation. Abdel-Rahman left Afghanistan to raise funds for international jihad.

  Although Abdel-Rahman was on the State Department’s terrorist watch list, he obtained a tourist visa and began delivering fiery Arabic sermons in New York City, calling for the death of Americans and Zionists and raising money for jihad.

  In a fatwa Abdel-Rahman condemned Americans as the “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists.” And he called on Muslims to assail the West, “cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land.”

  Many good Americans believe that everyone has the right to say anything. Why would we prohibit anyone’s free speech, especially if it takes place in a religious setting?

  “In America, we have a First Amendment,” a good friend pointed out. “Religion and state are separate. We can’t just go into a mosque and censor speech or arrest someone for what they say or think or for actions they have yet to commit.”

  “You don’t think these jihadists are crying ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater?” I ask. “That they are not a clear and present danger?”

  “That, my dear, must first be proven in a court of law.”

  He expressed the mind-set of many principled American law professors and judges.

  But what if radical Islam/Islamism—as practiced by the likes of Osama bin Laden—is not exactly a religion but is, rather, a blend of fascism and totalitarianism, a political and military pseudo-religious

  ideology—a death cult bent on world domination? What if Abdel-Rahman’s sermons consisted of illegal hate speech intended to legitimize bin Laden’s war on infidels?

  What if twenty-first-century Wahabi and Salafist Islamism is not what most Muslims wish to practice? What if such fiery sermonizers have hijacked the possibility of Islam’s evolution and created a dangerous cult of their own? Who will stop these hijackers—if that’s who they are? (Some say that they are not hijackers, that they are practicing the true Islam, that the Qur’an commands war against infidels.)

  In 1993, under Abdel-Rahman’s direction, jihadists exploded a car bomb in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Evidence revealed that the sheikh and his gang planned to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and
the FBI building.

  In 1995 Abdel-Rahman and his team were tried and convicted; they are all serving life sentences.

  But Abdel-Rahman’s followers remained active following his capture. In 1997 a jihadist group in Egypt shot and killed more than sixty tourists visiting the ancient temples of Luxor. The perpetrators were none other than Abdel-Rahman’s own personal Egyptian theological gangsters, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. They mutilated some bodies and left leaflets at the scene demanding the release of Abdel-Rahman.

  In late June 2012, in his first public speech, the Egyptian president-elect, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, promised to work for the release of Abdel-Rahman—the blind sheikh—to have him extradited to Egypt on humanitarian grounds.

  On September 11, 2012, at a sit-in protest a large group of Egyptian Salafists demanded the release of Abdel-Rahman. They yelled, “Death to Jews!” and insisted that the army of Islam would rise up under the leadership of Abdel-Rahman.

  In January 2013 President Morsi again demanded Abdel-Rahman’s release. Also in January 2013, al-Qaeda in North Africa commandeered an Algerian oil company and took many foreign hostages. The hostage takers also demanded the release of Abdel-Rahman. At least thirty-seven foreigners were murdered as the Algerian army ended the standoff.

  Remember how the Saudis turned to the infidel French in 1979 when the Grand Mosque in Mecca was captured? Nearly twenty years later, in 1990, after having proved himself against the Soviets, bin Laden expected the Saudi royals to use him when Iraq invaded Kuwait. However, both the Saudis and the Kuwaitis spurned bin Laden’s offers and again turned to infidels for military assistance.

  By the time of the first Gulf War, bin Laden had made quite a name for himself. Between 1980 and 1989 (and with the blessing of the Saudi government), he became the chief financier of the Afghan resistance. He also trained, supplied, and funded Arab warriors to join the Afghan mujahideen and set up special Arab military bases in Afghanistan.

  In 1988 bin Laden founded al-Qaeda for the purpose of waging a global jihad.

  When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Saudis rejected Osama’s military services. Just as his Saudi father and older half-brothers had once spurned him, now the Saudi princes had also rejected him. Osama was furious and grew bitter.

  In 1992 the Saudi king threw bin Laden out of the kingdom. Bin Laden found shelter in Sudan.

  Between 1993 and 2000, and with the help of Dr. Ayman Muhammad al-Zawahiri and Omar Abdel-Rahman (the blind sheikh), bin Laden engineered a series of murderous attacks against American soldiers and embassies in the Middle East and Africa (Mogadishu, Riyadh, Dhahran, Kenya, Tanzania, Aden, and others).

  In 1996 Sudan bowed to mounting international pressure and kicked bin Laden out.

  That year bin Laden released his “Declaration of Jihad,” and the Saudi kingdom revoked his citizenship. That’s when bin Laden fled to Afghanistan, where the warlord Mullah Omar offered to protect him.

  Bin Laden hatched his 9/11 plan in Afghanistan.

  Once I was at the mercy of tribal law in Afghanistan. Now the entire world seemed at its mercy as well.

  Ten long years passed, but bin Laden could not be found. Perhaps, like Saddam Hussein, he was living below ground in a rat hole. Or maybe he was living in an elite villa in Abbottabad, Pakistan, protected by America’s presumed allies, the Pakistani generals and Inter-Services Intelligence. Indeed this is precisely where Navy SEAL Team Six found and assassinated him in May 2011.

  But, as we saw in Benghazi on 9/11/12, al-Qaeda is not dead.

  A long time ago, when feminists first raised the issue of rape, we were immediately accused of hating men. Eventually, wearily, I came to say: “All men are not rapists—but almost all rapists are men.”

  Similarly I am not saying that all Muslims or all Arabs are terrorists. I say: “Today most terrorists are Muslim Islamists.”

  I work with some of the Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents and feminists whom I have named in this book. These brave souls have sounded the alarm against radical Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. The lucky ones have fled to the West. Some live under armed guard or in hiding and write under pseudonyms. Many have been forced to defend their writings and teachings in courts of law in both Europe and North America. The unlucky dissidents have been jailed, tortured, or murdered.

  Good people in the West have often failed to distinguish between Islam and Islamism; academics and journalists have been reluctant to accuse any Muslim of doing anything bad (like blowing up a hotel or ethnically cleansing black Africans, Jews, Hindus, and Christians), lest they be accused of profiling and Islamophobia.

  I understand that racism is a valid concern, a burning issue. I am also an antiracist. But 9/11 had nothing to do with race. It was part of an aggressive political, military, and religious crusade.

  America was attacked by ideologues who want infidels (of every race and ethnicity) to get out of Muslim holy lands. They also want Muslim women covered and subordinate. These ideologues are also at war with other branches of Islam, with promodern Muslim governments, and with individual Muslim freethinkers.

  Such ideologues live on every continent; their complexions are all the colors of the human race. African-born and Caucasian converts to Islam, including women and former prisoners, are becoming more numerous in the West. The subject deserves a separate book. Some are sincerely religious or for psychological reasons require a strong and regimented structure. Others are highly politicized Islamists.

  In the name of freedom they demand the right to renounce freedom. In the language of tolerance they demand that intolerance be granted a dignified place at the table.

  I once debated a British convert to Islam, Yvonne Ridley, on Alhurra TV. On September 28, 2001, Ridley was kidnapped in Afghanistan and held by the Taliban in solitary confinement for seven days. They tried to convert her, and she promised to read the Qur’an when she was free.

  Afterward Ridley converted to Islam—no, she became a true believer: a hater of Israel, America, and the godless West. Ridley’s instant rage level in a public debate was unsettling, even as political theater.

  Persecuting and scapegoating infidels is a time-honored way of diverting attention from some real villains. The truth is that Muslim-on-Muslim violence is far greater than infidel-on-Muslim violence.

  What Islamists accuse their enemies of doing (engaging in conspiracies, telling lies, controlling the media, brainwashing, lusting for a new colonial empire) is precisely what they themselves are doing.

  In 1996 a stateless bin Laden published an 11,831-word fatwa entitled “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Lands of the Two Holy Places.” It also appeared in English in a London newspaper. It is quite a toxic read. He writes, “The people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed upon them by the Zionist-Crusader alliance and their collaborators. [Muslims] are the main target for the aggression.”

  He attributes all Muslim suffering to this alliance—and concludes that “fighting [waging jihad] against the Kuffar [infidel] in every part of the world is absolutely essential.”

  Bin Laden defines jihad as a strictly military operation, not as an inner spiritual struggle. He writes, “There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land,” which includes or is symbolized by the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

  The Al Aqsa Mosque was established in 705 CE—it stands right above the site of the pre-existing first and second Jewish Temples which were established in 957 BCE and 515 BCE, respectively—well over a millennia earlier.

  Over and over again bin Laden condemns the Saudi regime, which he does not explicitly name, for having suspended “Islamic Shari’ah law and exchanging it with man-made civil law”; for its “inability to protect the country”; and for “allowing the enemy of the Umma
h [the Muslim people]—the American crusader forces—to occupy the land.”

  He is really angry at the Saudis, his father’s people, for having rejected and expelled him, for not rewarding his greatness. Although he mentions them repeatedly, he dares not focus on attacking them. He targets only the approved scapegoats.

  He hates and despises America, Israel, and infidels everywhere.

  He becomes the loving Father of Death to all the surrogate sons he sends to kill and die. Bin Laden promises his young jihadists paradise and the usual seventy-two virgins. Addressing the American secretary of defense, bin Laden writes, “[Our] youths love death as you love life. . . . Our youth believe in paradise after death. . . . If death is a pre-determined must, then it is a shame to die cowardly. . . . Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youths to wait for their turn in fighting and in operations.”

  What if bin Laden is right? What if our love of life and our own ethical standards turn out to be our undoing? How should the West fight against terrorists—by patiently infiltrating their groups, through targeted assassinations and drone attacks? Traditional military approaches cannot win in urban guerrilla warfare as terrorists happily hide behind Muslim civilians—including women and children.

  My Israeli colleague says, “Now the world will understand what Israel has been facing. We have been attacked every day, both on the ground and in the world media. The Palestinians are still lobbing rockets into southern Israel and terrifying our civilians. The false propaganda against us has grown in quantum leaps.”

  “I know,” I say. “In 2004 I estimated that the number of Israeli civilians who had, by then, died in a Palestinian Islamist terrorist attack was, in American demographic terms, the equivalent of 30,000–40,000 American deaths and approximately 300,000 Americans wounded.”