He is anything but a man of humble origins. Born in the mid-1950s, the youngest of some 20 sons of a Yemeni-born Saudi construction magnate, he enjoyed a youth of wealth and privilege. His father's close ties to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia won the family construction business rich contracts to rebuild mosques in Mecca and Medina. After his father's death in 1968, he in inherited some $300 million.

Graduating from King Abdul Aziz University in Jidda in 1979 with a degree in civil engineering, his life was one of living in the king's court, drinking heavily at night clubs, often engaging in bar brawls. But three events galvanized him and turned him into the Islamic extremist he is today: the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in a radical Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He immediately went to Afghanistan and spent the five years of the war there, fighting and raising money. While in Afghanistan he fell under the influence of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, seasoned militants who had assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981. They persuaded him that the jihad had to be expanded to the other moderate, "infidel" regimes of the Middle East.

In 1986, Bin Laden founded the first of more than a dozen training camps he would sponsor in Afghanistan. Then in 1987 he founded Al Qaeda ("The Base"), from which he hoped to launch his global jihad. Euphoric over the defeat of the Soviet Union, he and his Al Qaeda supporters concluded that no secular state could defeat holy warriors. He opened more camps and spent much of his personal fortune to finance the training and indoctrination of the militants who would spread the borderless jihad.

Bin Laden turned violently against the US in 1990 when King Fahd invited the US and its allies to station forces in Saudi Arabia to defeat Iraq after it invaded Kuwait. To him, the presence of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Muhammad and the home of the two holiest Muslim shrines, was blasphemous and unacceptable. He was further radicalized as the Palestinian problem continued to fester in Israel. He blamed the US for its intransigent support of Israel as the chief cause of the problem. Banned from Saudi Arabia, he fled to Sudan, which, after two 1996 terrorist attacks, banned him also.

He then fled to Afghanistan and by 1998 his Al Qaeda became an international militant Muslim coalition that formally declared it was the "duty" of Muslims everywhere to kill Americans. Since then, the 1998 twin bombings of American embassies in Africa and the attack in Yemen on the American destroyer Cole in October 2000 have been attributed to bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda is made up of an estimated two dozen separate militant Islamic groups from many countries, headed by bin Laden and governed loosely by a multinational council. Among the groups associated with Al Qaeda are the Algeria Armed Islamic Group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Lebanon's Hezbollah, the Islamic Movement of Usbekistan, Kashmir's Harakat ul- Mujahedin and the Philippines Moro Islamic Liberation Front. These and many others are organized in small cells, usually of fewer than a dozen people, many of them now naturalized Germans, Italians or Americans. It was these kinds of cells that brought the suicide attacks to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That is why military strikes will not do the job alone.

The world community must deny Al Qaeda access to the international financial system; impair its ability to raise funds; and expose, isolate and incapacitate the financial holdings of the terrorists. It will take months, if not years, of intelligence, police work and intense diplomacy to persuade America's allies it is time to track down and turn out the terrorists they may be harboring. It will be long, costly and dangerous, but it is a war that must be fought.

See New York Times, "Bin Laden, Child of Privilege Who Champions Holy War," and Wall Street Journal "Bin Laden is Focus of US Intelligence and Frustration."

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TERRORISM AND POSTMODERNISM

As I have argued many times on this program, postmodernism challenges assertions that truth and ethical judgment have any objective validity. This world view argues that truth, morality and objectivity are culturally constructed.

There are no absolutes and no transcendent standards by which to evaluate what is right and what is wrong. With the rejection of universal values and ideas, one is left with little basis for condemning the terrorists acts of 9/11. In fact, for some who are buying into what is called postcolonial ideology, such attacks "can be seen as a horrifying airing of a legitimate cultural grievance." In fact, in the postcolonial mind, there is only one absolute, namely that Western imperialism, centered in the United States, is the original sin from which all evil flows.

How should we think about this dilemma of postmodernism evaluating monstrous evil?

First, the ethical confusion of the postmodern world evaluating the terrorist acts of 9/11 is telling. It powerfully demonstrates the bankruptcy of postmodernism as a world view. If there is no construct for determining that this is evil, then the system must collapse under its own ethical weight. Postmodernism with its radical relativism that sees each individual as autonomous has no basis for condemning such evil. If autonomy rules the day, then on what basis is this evil? What those 19 radical extremists did was consistent with their world view. If there is no transcendent truth, then on what basis do we condemn it as evil?

Second, the basis for condemning terrorist acts of 9/11 as evil is God's moral law. The killing of innocent people is an attack on God. Each one of those people killed at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon bore God's image. To kill them is to attack their Creator. They were innocent civilians who had committed no injustice against these terrorists. As Marvin Olasky has written, "They want to murder Americans and Israelis. They want to murder fellow Muslims who do not agree with their twisting the Koran. . . They hope to murder millions." It is for this reason that we have the just right before God to stop them. There is a transcendent ethic that declares such acts evil, and that transcendent ethic also affirms a view of justice that demands they be stopped.

See World (22 September 2001), p. 46 and
Edward Rothstein New York Times (22 September 2001).

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HOW HAS 9/11 CHANGED AMERICA?

That 9/11 has changed America is obvious. We are only now beginning to understand how much.

Allow me to share some preliminary judgments:

1. America as a nation is coming to terms with the phrase that has been on its currency and coins but not in its heart--"In God We Trust." People across this nation are struggling to make sense of this monstrous evil. More prayers have gone up to God from the USA in the last two weeks than the entire decade of the nineties. More people have been in churches and synagogues during the last two weeks than in the entire decade of the nineties. Tragedy like this awakens the spiritual dimension of life. There has to be more to life than simply carnage like this!

2. This tragedy has awakened the incredible giving spirit of this nation. Untold people gave blood, money, time and love for people they never knew. A nation that was founded on principles of community and selflessness is awakened to those values again. Those values are the values central to Christianity. The United States has given more to the world in terms of aid than any other nation. Now we see Americans giving to their fellow citizens who are hurting!

3. Americans are awakened to a renewed concept of justice. God wills that human justice hold sway among governments and between citizens and civil authority. He does not prescribe that governments turn the other cheek. Legitimate states have the right to restrain life-threatening aggression and bring them to justice. But we also need to be a nation of mercy. We pray for those who seek to kill us, but we are to protect our nation as we pray for our enemies. President Bush has made it clear that we seek justice, not vengeance. We seek the perpetrators of evil, not the victims of evil.

4. America has set the pace for globalization. Those who have enjoyed the benefits of globalization, the peace and prosperity, the ease of trade and travel, the information and the entertainment, must now actively support the United States. "The United States is the pivot that makes today's globalization go round." If global trade, the movement of information and ideas, is to continue, then the world community must get behind the United States. The world must accept what the President has said: You are either for us or you stand with terrorism. This is a battle for civilization itself, and the United States cannot fight it alone.

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