{"quotes":[{"text":"I do not go to church. I don’t go to Christian church or Jew church or any other church. I don’t go to church at all. Not ever. A perfect Sunday for me is spent drinking green tea while reading the Sunday New York Times. Yikes! Why don’t I just turn in my Al-Qaeda membership form and call it a day? As if that wasn’t bad enough, not only do I not go to church:I don’t believe in God. How can I say the Pledge of Allegiance if I don’t believe in God? How can I spend our American currency which pledges “In God We Trust?” How can I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me God? Answer: I can’t. It’s a real problem. Don’t get me wrong – I’d like to believe in God. I wish I did, especially if He was the kind of God that thought America was #1. But I don’t, which to many people is the same as not believing in America. Up until recently, I thought those people were lunatics.","author":"Michael Ian Black","tags":["al-qaeda","atheism","atheist","belief","blog","funny","humor","jew","jewish","opinion","separation-of-church-and-state"],"id":1529,"author_id":"Michael+Ian+Black"},{"text":"Zoe stopped one last time in front of the mirror, adjusting her new American dress. She didn’t see the dress, however. She saw what the big Russian did to her. She saw what al-Qaeda did to her. She saw a person shunned by her Persian village. She saw ugliness. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw deficiency.","author":"Michael Benzehabe","tags":["al-qaeda","american-fashion","benzehabe","deficiency","depression","immigrant","insecurity","iran","outsider","persian","rape","russia","shame","shunned","unassimilated","western-fashion"],"id":2793,"author_id":"Michael+Benzehabe"},{"text":"The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["activism","al-qaeda","antisemitism","dictatorship","freedom-flotilla-ii","gaza","gaza-war","genocide","hamas","hezbollah","human-rights","israel","israeli-palestinian-conflict","middle-east","palestine","politics","protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion","symbolism"],"id":6195,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"[Al-Qaeda's supporters] are aware of the cracks in the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their own hands.","author":"Osama bin Laden","tags":["al-qaeda","finance","west"],"id":12744,"author_id":"Osama+bin+Laden"},{"text":"The similarities between groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State and USSR are too numerous and fundamental to be ignored. Both groups are driven by a totalitarian vision. The followers of Karl Marx envisioned a world transformed into a workers’ paradise in which all other classes had been destroyed and only one party, the Communist Party, was in control. Today’s jihadists also have a universal vision. They look forward to a global caliphate in which all have submitted to the will of Allah and live as Muslims, the infidels and apostates having been slain. Both visions are exclusive, absolutist, and totalitarian. They are predicated on a ‘them or us’ vision of how the world must be. There is no possibility for peaceful coexistence with the ‘other'.","author":"Sebastian Gorka","tags":["al-qaeda","islamic-state","terrorism","totalitarianism"],"id":54430,"author_id":"Sebastian+Gorka"},{"text":"Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["2011","abu-musab-al-zarqawi","al-qaeda","al-qaeda-in-iraq","arab-spring","death","death-of-osama-bin-laden","exorcism","feminism","iraq","islamism","life","literature","music","osama-bin-laden","pakistan","secularism","september-11-attacks","sunni-islam","terrorism","theocracy"],"id":101704,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"In al-Qaeda we see a terrorist grouping with, in many ways, a medieval ideology, employing today's technology to great advantage. It works in a thoroughly modern way, virtual, amorphous, franchised and unbounded by geography. It has recruited people from all over the world. It understands the power of images, both in its campaign of terror and in its recruitment and proselytising material. It skillfully exploits the instant communications and social networking of the IT age.","author":"Eliza Manningham-Buller","tags":["al-qaeda","medievalism","modernity","technology","terrorism"],"id":238208,"author_id":"Eliza+Manningham-Buller"},{"text":"It is very important to concentrate on hitting the U.S. Economy through all means possible.","author":"Osama bin Laden","tags":["al-qaeda","economy","terrorism","united-states"],"id":312139,"author_id":"Osama+bin+Laden"},{"text":"In our towns and cities they will continue to be born, in our communities they will go on to be nurtured \u0026 radicalised \u0026 from within our neighbourhoods they will terrorise \u0026 murder our citizens including women \u0026 children in their attempt to destroy the very fabric \u0026 order of our civilised society. They are influenced by our ignorance, our lack of knowledge is their power, martyrdom in the name of their God and prophet is their aspiration \u0026 so it is critical that we waste no time \u0026 learn more about them \u0026 this ideology they follow before we can even begin to eradicate this chilling \u0026 growing endemic Islamic faith based terrorism’.","author":"Cal Sarwar","tags":["9-11","al-qaeda","british-people","christianity","faith","iraq-war","isis","islam","islamic-terrorism","jihad","judaism","police","religion","syria","taliban","terrorism"],"id":353764,"author_id":"Cal+Sarwar"},{"text":"Me, personally. I do not know a soul who perished that day of 9/11. But it did then, does now, and I imagine it always will bring out the Patriot in me.","author":"James Hauenstein","tags":["9-11","al-qaeda","heroes","heroism","memorial","patriotic","patriotism","pentagon","remembering","trade-centers"],"id":375241,"author_id":"James+Hauenstein"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":13,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}