Al-Qaeda's Jihad Against America

As we learned in class, in August 1996, Osama Bin Laden, one of the leading founders of Al-Qaeda who worked diligently to promote extreme Islamic views throughout the Middle East, declared a jihad, or holy war, against America. One of the main reasons driving him to do so was that the American military was intervening in Islamic affairs by using Saudi Arabia as a staging area during the US' fight against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, which he believed was extremely sacrilegious -- Because extremist Muslims at the time believed that only close followers of Islam could get involved in Saudi Arabian affairs (as it was the Holy Land in Islam), he was enraged when he learned that the Saudi royal family designated responsibility for fighting the Iraqi military from Saudi Arabia to the US rather than Al-Qaeda. Thus, Bin Laden was led to believe that the Saudi royal family was corrupt and that the US was an evil force that needed to be ridden from Saudi Arabia through fighting since his hardcore beliefs mandated such drastic actions. These thoughts were detailed in Bin Laden's fatwa, "The Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places" when he formally publicized his hatred towards the US and made his jihad official to the world. So, just as Bin Laden worked to rid the Soviets from Afghanistan when he fought with the mujahideen in the 1980s, in the late 1990s he worked with other terrorists in Al-Qaeda to plan and carry out terrorist attacks against the US throughout the world. Because there were many other jihadists who agreed with his thoughts and were willing to die to protect the Holy Land, plots such as "the plane plan" (Bin Laden's name for the eventual 9/11 attacks) and the US Embassy bombings in East Africa were able to grow and come to fruition within just a few years of his declaration of war against America. The immense amount of planning and work that went into each major terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda throughout the group's jihad against the US were extremely substantial to the tensions between America and extremist Muslims throughout the Middle East at the time, showing the drastic extent to the differences between American and fundamental Islamic culture at the time. These tensions were also expressed fervently throughout Bin Laden's Islamic writings such as his Declaration of Jihad itself, which claims that "the community of Islam has suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims' blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies." Therefore, based on the severe, gruesome language that Bin Laden uses to slander and villify America (the "Crusaders") and Judaism (the "Zionists"), it is indisputable that he and other members of Al-Qaeda were adamant towards pushing the US and Israel out of Islamic affairs and defending Saudi Arabia throughout the jihad. And because of the major terrorist attacks that Bin Laden plotted against the US based on his religious and cultural views and carried out on September 11, 2001, President Bush began pushing for his War on Terror, escalating the fight between Al-Qaeda and the US for years to come.