Thursday 25 September 2008

The Fanatic and Social Schizophrenia

As I'm coming up to the last year in my BA (first lectures of term in but seven hours), I've been reading up on my planned thesis for my PhD. This will be focused on a comparative dissection of Political movements, their ideology and their acts of political violence. The case studies will hopefully be The Romanian Iron Guard, the Jacobins of the French Revolution and either the MB or the wider Salafist movement (tho just in case , I'm having a look at SR and Black/Red violence too). Every now and then a little weird gem comes my way - Such as this by Gilles Kepel

'If you take a character like Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian-born, German-educated leader of the group of 9/11 hijackers, you have the characteristic of schizophrenia: Atta wrote his M.A. thesis in Hamburg on the benefits of cohabitation between Christians and Muslims in the Syrian city of Aleppo, to keep its multi-cultural dimension, and how to develop solutions for Christians not to flee Aleppo. But this is the same man who, while he was with his group hijacking planes, had one of his Saudi acolytes write “the will of Mohamed Atta” which said “if any one of your victims is trying to rebel, slit his throat like the Prophet said and plunder him, but be careful when you plunder that you are not stabbed in the back,” using a very narrow interpretation of Qu’ranic verses, which puts you back in the 7th century A.D.'

http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/5014.html

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Paul
You are SO funny!

socialrepublican said...

Who's Paul?