One of the chief suspects was a young cultist called Yoshihiro Inoue, the guru’s intelligence chief. He was caught driving a car that contained chemicals for manufacturing high explosives. This left no one in any doubt that the cult’s protestations about love and peace were false. On 16 May, there was another huge police raid on the Mount Fuji headquarters; this time they found a secret room, inside which a large, bearded figure sat cross-legged on the floor in the meditation posture. He admitted: “I am the guru. Don’t touch me, I don’t even allow my disciples to touch me.”
Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, had been born blind in one eye and partially blind in the other. He was raised in a poor home, but had been a brilliant pupil at school. He thought of becoming a radical politician, like Mao Tse Tung, then began to meditate and claimed that one day he felt the kundalini (the sacred energy that electrifies and enlightens the soul) mounting his spine. The 1980s in Japan were rather like the 1960s in Britain and America, a period that Asahara’s biographers have called “the rush hour of the gods”.
Asahara founded a yoga school, which became so profitable that he opened several more. Then he went off to the Himalayas to meditate and had himself photographed with the Dalai Lama, who told him he had the mind of a Buddha. (After Asahara’s arrest, the Dalai Lama was deeply embarrassed by this gaffe.) There in the Himalayas, Asahara claims he experienced enlightenment and achieved psychic powers.
Back in Tokyo he changed the name of his yoga school to Aum Supreme Truth (Om or Aum is a Sanskrit syllable pronounced during meditation). Teaching a mixture of Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism (with the predictions of Nostradamus thrown in for good measure) Asahara, who claimed to be the embodiment of the god Shiva, was soon surrounded by hundreds of followers. Since he assured them that large cash donations would hasten their spiritual enlightenment, he was soon a wealthy man. Brilliant young students from the universities began to join the sect; one of them, Hideo Murai, invented a kind of electric cap which, when placed on the head, supposedly raised the user’s level of consciousness.
But desertion roused Asahara to a kind of frenzy. One disciple who announced he was leaving the sect was told he was in need of physical as well as psychological help, and ordered to drink large quantities of freezing water. After a few pints, he went into shock and died. Another disenchanted disciple, Shuji Taguchi, was strangled; his body burned. Another was attacked when he had returned home to his family; his skull was smashed with a hammer. The cult members also murdered his wife and child.
The sect had a strict celibacy law, but as so often happens with rogue messiahs, the guru couldn’t resist the temptations of the flesh himself. Asahara regularly enjoyed sex with selected female disciples, who were then sworn to secrecy.
During the 1990s, Aum Supreme Truth began to spread all over the world. There had probably not been such a successful cult since Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. The post-Communist Russians were particularly sympathetic to it, and Aum Supreme Truth continued to be a powerful movement in Russia – but under the new name of Aleph.
World success made Asahara think in terms of world power. In 1993, his chief engineer, Kiyohide Hayakawa, was instructed to try and buy an atomic bomb. (In fact, during 1994, Hayakawa made eight trips to Russia trying to buy a nuclear warhead.) When he failed, the cult tried to buy a rural area near Tokyo, where there were deposits of uranium. And when this also failed they decided to buy land in Australia. It was half a million acres of scrubland called Banjawarn Station, which the cult bought for $400,000, in cash, after which it paid a further $110,000 for mining rights. There they began testing nerve gas on sheep whose skeletons were later found by police.
However, rumours that the cult tested the world’s first non-governmental atomic bomb in the Australian outback are probably false. A large detonation took place near Banjawarn Station while the cult were camped there – registered by seismologists hundreds of miles away – but this is now thought to have been caused by the atmospheric explosion of a large meteor or a small comet.
As the cult’s success increased, so did its paranoia. This mindset seems to have escalated sharply after the interest the police took in the disappearance of Kiyoshi Kariya, and this “persecution” in turn seems to have triggered the decision to launch the sarin attacks. It certainly made no sense. What possible point could there be to gassing hundreds of people in the Tokyo subway system?
Asahara’s trial failed to enlighten the public. Placed on the stand in 1996, he refused to enter a plea of either guilty or not guilty. For almost nine years, as the trial ground along, the ex-guru flatly refused to answer questions with anything but incomprehensible mutterings. In February 2004, he was sentenced to death on multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. Twelve of his followers are also on death row for related crimes. All appealed their death sentences, safe in the knowledge that, given the slowness of the Japanese justice system, they might avoid execution for many years, even if their appeals were ultimately unsuccessful.
So, why did they do it? The followers, predictably, say that they were acting on the guru’s orders, and were not privy to his divine plan. Asahara, through his lawyer, claims the followers cooked up the whole scheme themselves, without his knowledge. He says that he doesn’t know why they tried to murder so many people.
Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda
On the morning of 11 September 2001, two hijacked Boeing 757 passenger jets were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the New York World Trade Centre; the first struck the North Tower at 8.45 a.m., the second hit the South Tower at 9.06 a.m. Both of the 110-storey (1,350-foot) skyscrapers collapsed within an hour and a half of the first impact.
The death toll caused by the destruction of Twin Towers has been estimated as 2,752 people. (This figure remains debatable, as officials have refused to include dozens of missing homeless people and illegal immigrants who are thought – but cannot be proved – to have been in the disaster area.)
At 9.40 a.m., a third hijacked Boeing 757 struck the west side of the Pentagon building in Washington DC – the nerve centre of the US Military; 189 people were killed.
At 10.37 a.m., the fourth and last hijacked plane crashed in open countryside near Shanksville Pennsylvania, killing all forty-four on board. A mobile phone message from a passenger just before the crash said that he and some others were going to try to recapture the plane from terrorists. It has been speculated that, if the hijackers had not crashed the Shanksville plane prematurely, they would have tried to collide the jet into Camp David – the presidential rural retreat in Maryland. American President George W. Bush Junior was not in residence at the time, but Camp David was where the historic peace accord between Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was signed in 1978: a hated symbol of Arab–Israeli cooperation to many Moslem fundamentalists.
The death toll for what has come to be known simply as “9/11” (i.e. – 11 September 2001) – including the nineteen suicide hijackers – is 2,985 people.
It is known that the hijackers were Islamic fundamentalists – and were mostly Saudi Arabians. The al-Qaeda terrorist network, headed by Osama bin Laden, is strongly suspected of being behind the 11 September hijackings. Much has been written and said about Osama bin Laden – much of it understandably vitriolic screeds that have raised the man to a similar level of infamy as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin – but is he, as he is so often described, a man dedicated to “evildoing”?
The tabloid view of Osama bin Laden is that of a foam-mouthed, rabid-eyed Islamic fanatic, driven by a hatred of Western decency. To quote US President George W. Bush from a speech to Congress in September 2001: “They [bin Laden and al-Queda] hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”
On the other hand, Western journalists who have actually met bin Laden have described him as mild-mannered, hospitable and even rather introverted. His hatred of the W
est and anything that does not fall under his cruel interpretation of Islamic law cannot be denied, but neither has he been legally proved to have been directly involved with the 9/11 atrocity.
The main evidence presented to date – a very rough video recording in which bin Laden apparently confesses to being told about the attacks five days before they happened – is now widely suspected to be a fake. But even if the tape is real and the statement is true, bin Laden’s “confession” actually exonerates him of the charge of planning the 9/11 attacks. The plot was years in the making, not five days. The FBI and CIA had evidence of the coming attack longer than that, but few people suspect that the federal government was behind the attacks.
Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957. His mother was Syrian and his father was from Yemen, so Osama automatically inherited three nationalities. His father had built a considerable fortune in the construction business, helped in no small part by his close ties to both the Saudi royal family and, ironically enough, with certain American oil dynasties, including that of President George Bush.
Osama certainly had a privileged upbringing – he was well-educated, trained in engineering, speaks fluent English and inherited a personal fortune in the multi-millions – but, unlike many Saudi rich kids of his generation, he held firmly to Wahhabi Islamic principals (“Wahhabi” is roughly equivalent to the Christian term “Puritan”). This certainly led to his present, absolutist frame of mind, but to blame Islam for the crimes of Islamic terrorists is like blaming the Bible for the Spanish Inquisition.
The Koran is one of the few holy books to stress the Allah-given right of the individual to free thought. It also expressly forbids anyone from claiming to be a Prophet of Allah – Mohammad is said to have been the “true and final Prophet” – with the result that Islam has suffered from relatively few mad messiahs in its history. We have already seen numerous examples of just how useful such an explicit prohibition might have been in the Christian Bible.
It is certainly true that the version of Islam professed by Osama bin Laden – the repression of women, the legal curtailment of most forms of secular entertainment, the enforced growing of beards and the willingness to condone mass killing – is cruel and ultra-conservative enough to shock and disgust liberals of all stripes, but it is not strictly true that he is entirely motivated by a hatred of Western freedoms. Bin Laden fought for years to drive the Soviet invaders out of Afghanistan, spending much of his personal fortune and aided by advice and assistance from the CIA (it should be noted, however, that bin Laden always refused US financial aid, apparently regarding the money of infidels to be unsuitable for a holy war).
Despite its present “evil-doer” image in the West, al-Qaeda was essentially a support organization for the Afghan and foreign freedom fighters, who called themselves the mujahideen (Arabic for “strugglers”). Bin Laden’s network was originally a number of safe houses and secret training bases (al-Qaeda means “the base”) where mujahideen could rest and train to defeat the Communist and, more importantly for bin Laden, atheist interlopers.
Following the victory of the Afghan freedom fighters, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, and was disappointed when he and his fellow freedom fighters did not receive a heroes’ welcome. Later, in August 1990 when the Iraqi leader, Sadam Hussein, invaded the small but oil-rich Gulf State of Kuwait, bin Laden feared that the secularist dictator might soon try to invade the holy motherland of Saudi Arabia itself. He went to the Saudi authorities and offered to raise a new mujahideen army to defend the country – he clearly saw that the small Saudi army would be no match for the giant Iraqi war machine.
He was thus infuriated when his offer was flatly refused, then became incandescent with rage when the Saudi royal family invited half a million US soldiers to come and defend the Saudi homeland. To call on foreigners – most of whom were not of the Islamic faith – to defend the holy cities of Mecca and Medina was, in bin Laden’s eyes, treachery and sacrilege combined. In 1991 he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for stating these views too publicly.
He spent the next five years in Sudan, fomenting and an anti-US interest group, but not, so far as the present evidence suggests, actually plotting any terrorist actions. At first the Saudi government tried to woo him back by offering to rescind his order of exile, but he refused. So they froze his known financial assets and stripped him of his Saudi citizenship. The US then put pressure on the Sudanese government to expel bin Laden, prompting his return to Afghanistan.
Since the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Afghanistan had been in a state of endless civil war – first between the remains of the Soviet puppet government and the mujahideen freedom fighters, then between numerous petty warlords, all seeking to control Afghanistan’s huge opium trade. In contrast to the days of the Soviet occupation, the West – and the CIA – showed little or no interest in Afghanistan’s new agonies.
Then a group of Koran students, calling themselves the Taliban, raised a religious army and swept across the country, all but wiping the warlords off the map. The West initially applauded the return of order to Afghanistan, but soon became uneasy at extreme theocratic tyranny set up by the Taliban.
Women were essentially imprisoned in their homes and could be executed if they allowed any man, other than their husband, see them even partially naked. Since female doctors – and all other female professions – were banned, this effectively denied health care to the entire female population. Almost all signs of public frivolity were also outlawed and breaking any one of dozens of highly intolerant theocratic laws could lead to a public execution – about the only form of public entertainment that the Taliban felt was harmless. This was the atmosphere that greeted Osama bin Laden when he returned to Afghanistan.
Becoming increasingly radical, bin Laden started to make public calls for a global war to end American imperialism and Israeli suppression of the Palestinians – this last was undoubtedly hypocritical, as Palestinian immigrants are also treated extremely badly in many Islamic countries. In 1998 he called for a fatwa (a religious ruling in the name of all Islam) to destroy the United States and those, like Israel and the Saudi royal family, who sided with them. Shortly thereafter, simultaneous bomb attacks levelled the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 258 people and injuring over 5,000. Bin Laden denied he was behind the attacks, but several captured terrorists implicated him as the source of funds for the operation.
In 1998, US President Bill Clinton (floundering in allegations of sexual misconduct literally in office) gave the go-ahead for two non-nuclear cruise missile strikes. One destroyed a factory in Sudan with financial links to bin Laden. It was claimed that it was a nerve gas production facility, but later turned out to have been a medicine factory. The second strike was aimed at bin Laden himself, in Afghanistan, but failed to kill him.
It is not known how many casualties were caused by these missile strikes, but if the US hoped to break al-Qaeda, it was to be brutally disappointed. Thanks to the publicity resulting from the United States trying – and failing – to kill one man, every Islamic fanatic on the planet started to feel kinship with bin Laden. The result is the Islamic terrorist network – of which al-Qaeda is just a part – that has replaced nuclear war as the West’s greatest fear.
In October 2000, a suicide bomb hidden in a small boat detonated against the side of the USS Cole, docked in the port of Aden. Seventeen US sailors were killed. Bin Laden applauded the attack, but denied direct involvement. The world steeled itself for more such acts of murder, but when the next one came, on 11 September 2001, it left the planet flabbergasted.
The American-led invasion of Afghanistan has since crushed the Taliban theocracy, and it is now rumoured that the still fugitive bin Laden is suffering from a severe kidney dysfunction. If so, it is probable that he is very ill, reliant on a dialysis machine, and is therefore unlikely to be much more than a figurehead for the global cell system of radical Islamic terrorists.
To call bin Laden a mad messiah would
be to overstate his importance to the beliefs he seeks to represent, and to define al-Queda and their fellow travellers as a cult of fanatics is to oversimplify a complex socio-political situation. Murderous, bigoted thugs they may be, but their cause is far from mindless; few, even of the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, have actually called for the whole world to be forced to convert to Islam – most just want an end to excessive Western influence in Islamic affairs. Many Moslems, extremist and mainstream, argue that Western nations have unashamedly exploited and politically manipulated the Middle East for over a century. It was deep-seated resentment at this ruthless economic imperialism, as they see it, that was the main cause of the 9/11 atrocity.
Noam Chomsky, the respected American academic and social commentator, remarked only days after the 9/11 atrocity: “[It] is common knowledge among anyone who pays attention to the [Middle East] region, that the terrorists draw from a reservoir of desperation, anger, and frustration that extends from rich to poor, from secular to radical Islamist. That it is rooted in no small measure in US policies is evident and constantly articulated to those willing to listen.”
Perhaps it is not enough to only strike back at a cult that apparently hates most of the world – non-Moslem infidels and liberal Moslems alike. It may be necessary to ask why they hate us.
Colin Wilson, World Famous Cults and Fanatics
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