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Al-Qaeda

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Terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property. ~ Osama bin Laden

al-Qaeda (Tanzim Qa`idat al-Jihad) is an Islamic group for global jihad. It has been designated as a terrorist group by most governments. It was founded by Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, and other Soviet-Afghan War veterans in 1988. Under bin Laden’s leadership, it carried out the September 11 attacks and fought with the United States in the War on Terror.

Quotes

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Quotes by al-Qaeda members.

About

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There is no particular Government policy decision, or even an overall policy stance, which we could change in order somehow to remove our society from the al-Qaeda firing line. Its nihilism means that our societies would cease to be a target only if we were to renounce all the values of freedom and liberty that we have fought to extend over so many years. ~ Charles Clarke
  • First of all, Al-Qaeda is a phenomenon...If it is an organization only, I have no link to the organization whatsoever, nor to Sheikh Osama bin Laden, nor to anybody in Al-Qaeda. It is the phenomenon of Al-Qaeda – what they believe, and what their own path is, what their own methods are. I believe Al-Qaeda... Every Muslim around the world shares many things with them. They pray toward the Ka'ba – we pray toward the Ka'ba. They pray five times a day – we pray five times a day. They are Muslims – we are Muslims. They fight against occupiers – we fight against occupiers. So we share with them all these Islamic values. But we don't share with them the structures, activities, and actions. Therefore, if you speak about Al-Qaeda as an organization with a particular dogma, a particular thought and method – definitely, I do not have a relationship with Al-Qaeda. Otherwise I do not think I would be at this table.
  • Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking: Who attacked our country? The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda. They are some of the same murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for bombing the USS Cole. Al-Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world—and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere. The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics—a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam. The terrorists’ directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children.
    • George W. Bush, “Our Mission and Our Moment” speech (September 20, 2001)
  • To begin to bring troops home before our commanders tell us we are ready … would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaeda, risking a humanitarian catastrophe, and allowing the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq and gain control of vast oil resources they could use to fund new attacks on America.
  • The famous nuclear strategist Herman Kahn likened deterrence to a game of chicken played by reckless teenagers who drive their cars at each other and wait for the "loser" to swerve. Kahn wrote that perhaps the best way to win is to "get into the car quite drunk" and, when your opponent is watching, to "[take] the steering wheel and [throw] it out the window" -- a pretty solid, if irresponsible, way of convincing your enemy that you are willing to act against your own best interest...

    ...Despite these problems, Israel has regularly tried to deter Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups. The record has been mixed. Fearing the Israeli response, these groups have at times limited attacks or refrained from them altogether, but they (and Israel) have resumed violence when their internal politics changed or because they believed the other side was behaving too provocatively. In addition to their use of terrorism, these groups also have mini-armies, run political parties, and operate schools and hospitals, making them more like quasi-states than a group like al Qaeda -- which isn't deterrable because it has no territory, is ideologically extreme, and has fewer constituents to lose. (Al Qaeda is always the drunk guy pushing the gas pedal down all the way after having thrown the wheel out the window.)
  • It's wrong to claim, as some do, that the motivation of al-Qaeda and its allies is some desire to seek justice in the middle east [...] al-Qaeda and its allies have no clear demands for the middle east. The only common thread in their approach is a violent and destructive opposition to democracy in any form. They find democracy in Palestine abhorrent and seek to destroy it.
  • Al-Qaeda and its allies have no clear demands for the middle east. The only common thread in their approach is a violent and destructive opposition to democracy in any form. They find democracy in Palestine abhorrent and seek to destroy it. … Al-Qaeda finds democracy in Israel abhorrent and seeks to destroy it. It finds democracy in Afghanistan abhorrent and seeks to destroy it. Now it finds the democracy in Iraq, which the United Nations is trying to support and establish, so abhorrent that it does whatever it can to try to destroy it. … Al-Qaeda's methods, too, are different. It recognises no common bonds with people who have different beliefs and its members are prepared to kill indiscriminately. Indeed, mass murder is their explicit objective — the measure of success in their terms. Their methods of recruitment bear more comparison to self-destructive cults than political movements. However, we must acknowledge that their modern nihilism is innovative, flexible and cunning. al-Qaeda and the networks that are inspired by it approach the task with all the resources of modern technology and all the focus of modern zealotry. The most important conclusion to draw from this analysis is that there is no particular Government policy decision, or even an overall policy stance, which we could change in order somehow to remove our society from the al-Qaeda firing line. Its nihilism means that our societies would cease to be a target only if we were to renounce all the values of freedom and liberty that we have fought to extend over so many years.
  • [W]hat al Qaeda is fighting for is a traditional understanding of the family. This is not a minor part of their program: it is at its heart. The traditional family is built around some clearly defined principles.

    First, the home is the domain of the woman and life outside the house is the purview of the man. Second, sexuality is something confined to the family and the home, and extramarital, extrafamilial sexuality is unacceptable. Women who move outside the home invite extramarital sexuality just by being there. Third, women have as their primary tasks reproduction and nurturing of the next generation. Therefore, intense controls on women are necessary to maintain the integrity of the family and of society. In an interesting way it is all about women, and bin Laden's letter [to the U.S.] drives this home. What he hates about America is that it promotes a completely different view of women and the family.

  • Again, the [9/11] hijackers were described as deviants who had lost their way and did not represent either their society or the true Islam. But the Saudi hijackers were not outcasts, they weren’t even living on the far margins, not even the way Mansour had done. They had gone to school and learned the Quran, grown up in mostly middle-class, deeply religious families, and gone to university to study law. Some were school dropouts; only one of them had mental difficulties, for which he found solace at the mosque. They were imams in neighborhood mosques, or hafiz, men who had learned the entire Quran by heart. Most of them had gone briefly to Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya in 1999 or 2000, although few had made it to an actual battlefield.
    • Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)
  • [D]iving into the “troves” of files that the Alec team collected, Storer had an epiphany moment: “I’m like, holy crap, it’s a terrorist organization.” Bin Laden’s fighters weren’t a loose federation but a bureaucracy, complete with a payroll and franchises. Yet even in the counterterrorist center, colleagues on other accounts remained doubtful that scattered fighters could pose an organized threat on the level of Hezbollah or Hamas. As Storer put it, many officers regarded the terrorists as “ragheads who lived in a cave,” when in fact the leaders were “doctors and lawyers and military officers who knew their shit.”
    • Cindy Storer as quoted by Gina Bennett, “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous”; as quoted by Liza Mundy, “The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming”, The Atlantic, (November 18, 2023); adapted from The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA.
  • She and a few other analysts had written nearly 40 warning items that year alone. She had a pile of papers two feet high on her desk, including one by the FAA about hijackings. Crafting the memo with the input of colleagues, Sude noted that bin Laden had implied in TV interviews that he wanted to follow the example of the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef, and “bring the fighting to America.” The memo pointed out that the 1998 bombings of the embassies in East Africa, which bin Laden associates had scoped out as early as 1993, showed that al-Qaeda was patient and “not deterred by setbacks.” Al-Qaeda members “have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years,” she wrote. Threat reporting suggested that bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft, and the FBI had noted patterns of activity suggesting “preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.”
  • Sude would always wonder: When President Bush was told of the existence of more than 70 FBI investigations into bin Laden activities in the American homeland, did the commander in chief worry? Did he ever call the FBI director and ask him what was going on? Bush later told congressional investigators that he felt heartened to learn of so many investigations. He took it to mean that things were under control. After the August 6 PDB ran, four weeks passed before the Bush administration had its first Cabinet-level meeting about the threat posed by al-Qaeda, on September 4, 2001.
  • The US State Department's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism has found that going by the number of terror attacks and the number of killings of innocent citizens every year from 2012 until now, the big-five terror group consists of the IS, Taliban, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, and the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
    • US State Department's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism quoted in Vivek Agnihotri, Urban Naxals, The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2018, Garuda Prakashan)
  • Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida eventually will die. But the model that al-Qaida has created of an asymmetric terror group that has enormous consequences in the world well beyond the size of the group, that's going to endure. Other groups are going to try to follow that model.

See also

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