The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It
By Terry McDermott
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, N.Y., 330 pp., May 2005
Reviewed by Mark Biskeborn
“I found him standing there, staring up at the name sheets to see where he was assigned,” said Mohamed Mokhtar el-Rafei. “I introduced myself. ‘I’m Mohamed,’ I said. So was he. We looked at the class sheets. We had three full classes of Mohameds. …We used our fathers’ names to refer to one another. I was Rafei. He was always Amir.” |
Mohamed Mokhtar el-Rafei was among the classmates who befriended Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta whom we’ve come to know as Mohamed Atta, now almost as a household name. He became infamous for leading the 9/11 attacks.
If you’re looking to peer into the motivations that drive suicide bombers, Terry McDermott’s recently released book takes you on one of the most illuminating voyages through the lives of three of the nineteen radical Muslims who teamed up to hijack four commercial airliners and to use them as ready made weapons of mass destruction. Although the other sixteen fundamentalists remain mostly unknown, the author reveals a comprehensive and thorough view into the lives of the three known terrorists. He threads together a detailed account of how Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarra, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, among others, evolve from sharp, ambitious students from third world Muslim cities into horrid suicide bombers. In the intertwining biographies, the reader gains insightful understanding of recent Middle Eastern history, politics, and culture. This book opens a piercing window into the intellectual and emotional paths that led these men to become suicide bombers.
A fluid group of Muslim foreign students in Germany evolved into members of a Hamburg terrorist cell, a team of “perfect soldiers,” who, while living on social margins and alienated from the mainstream of Germany society, absorbed religious fundamentalist ideologies and embraced them as clear life goals. They transformed their lives from ragtag members of the third world’s middle class into a purposeful, God-chosen team with a fanatic and absolute understanding of an otherwise confusing and unfriendly Western world. They found meaning and significance in their lives from the fundamentalist ideologies wrought by Islamic intellectuals such as Egyptians Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, founders of the Muslim Brotherhood. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times, McDermott took great pains to research the lives of these three suicide bombers in order to gain understanding about their motivations. His premise aims clearly to develop the tools to defeat terrorism. We have no choice but to understand them in order to stop them, despite whatever President Bush and his minions say in their speeches and battle cries to justify war in Iraq where no such terrorists operated before the U.S. occupation.
“I’m sure this effort to understand the motivations of the men behind September 11 will upset other people who will think that any attempt at understanding is somehow an attempt to excuse, or even glorify. It is not. A primary task…of the journalist is to empathize, to try to understand the way the world appeared to the people begin written about… As I write now, three years later, [after 9/11] , the killing continues with no good end in sight. The sooner we come to understand what is happening, the sooner we will have a chance to stop it. Until we do understand, we have no chance at all.” |
Poverty recurs often in this book as one of the more prominent motives that kindles the fires of radical fundamentalism and ignites the imagination of young men, alienated, rebellious and looking for a cause.
“When people say that if not for oil there would be nothing in the desert kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, it is not a great exaggeration. Before the oil, there wasn’t much, but the region was not entirely empty. Before oil, there was, of course, desert -- sand and the occasional date palm oasis -- and few, very few people.” |
“Sudan was so poor that Bin Laden was able, without much apparent effort, to acquire near monopolies on many of the country’s principal trading activities.”
Without elaborate explanations, this book also describes how small petro-dollar princes and contractors retain all the oil money, while the vast majority of the population, including well educated men like Atta, Jarra, al-Shehhi or Omari, live in a dead economy where unemployment runs out of control. These men serve as models for the motives of many other suicide bombers and terrorists. They are educated but extremely frustrated about their situation. They initially want to participate in a prosperous world. They go to good schools in Cairo and elsewhere in the Middle East. For example, Mohammed Atta’s father pushed his son to pursue the highest levels of a professional career and to study in Germany. “Amir [Atta’s father] said he wanted his son to match his daughter’s successes. ‘I almost tricked him to go to Germany to continue his education.’”
They enjoy going on educational adventures in prosperous Germany or America. But their ambitions hit brick walls of social alienation. Carrying the baggage of strict Islamic culture into the liberal countries made them feel uncomfortable and out of place. Their hearts and minds remained in the highly disciplined and structured Middle Eastern customs while they looked to grow professionally in liberal democracies. They remained only on the margins of these Western countries and eventually criticize and rebel against their liberal host countries. They find fault especially with America for occupying their holy Islamic territories, for propping up Middle Eastern secular dictators as proxy puppet rulers and despots, such as the Royal family of Saud, and for supporting Israel. “Amir saw a worldwide conspiracy at work, bolstered by the Americans, but run always by Jews.”
When these students returned as men to their Middle Eastern countries, they discover only corrupt bureaucracies. “…Cairo University produced more than 1,000 engineering graduates every single year. The net result was the more education you had the less likely you were to find a suitable job. In one recent year, young Egyptians with graduate degrees were 32 times more likely to be unemployed than illiterate peasants.”
They find solace in their hopeless situation by withdrawing from the harsh reality and looking for a way to rebel against it, if not reinvent it in a way that empowered them with honor, glory, and social admiration. “The Hamburg men who joined their plights to that of fundamentalist Islam chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world view, in fact, of a new world.”
Without providing extensive analysis or commentary, McDermott reports the facts as he uncovers them. He lays out the people, places, and events with detailed, intriguing clarity. His descriptions deliver enough background for his readers to draw their own conclusions or to raise well informed questions. For example, we can see that several types of motivations fuel the terrorists to commit the ultimate mission of suicide bombers. As Emile Durkheim outlined at the beginning of the twentieth century, alienation, loneliness, depression, despair, and a fervent longing for a sense of mission and importance and social recognition – these elements represent the main drivers for different types of suicide. But in the Middle Eastern countries of fervent fundamentalism where a vast majority of people admire martyrdom, and where economic inequity and unemployment runs rampant, all these motivations for suicide can coalesce and result in the atrocities that occur every day in the West Bank, Israel or in Iraq, and occasionally in the U.S.A.
Readers might ask other pertinent questions. Why America invaded Iraq when in fact, none of the terrorists involved in 9/11, or any of their leaders had any ties with that country? Iraq possesses 11% of the world’s oil reserves. Was the 9/11 attack a simple pretext to make a grab at this valuable resource? Was it pay back to Saddam Hussein who did not play into the role of proxy despot for the interests of U.S. petroleum corporations?
Attentive readers are led to wonder about many aspects of recent history. The same terrorists and their non-nation-state organization, Al Qaeda, repeated many bombings against the U.S. The FBI and the CIA were aware of these direct and intentional attacks. The U.S. intelligence organizations operate as enormous and extremely expensive bureaucracies. Why are they still ineffective in protecting America’s borders?
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York gave the U.S. a clear message that a fundamentalist Islamic organization held the country in contempt. Osama Bin Laden had made several declarations of war against the U.S., including explanations for al-Qaeda’s resentment. Since the 1993 bombing, al-Qaeda carried out a series of attacks on American facilities abroad, from embassies in Africa to naval vessels in the Persian Gulf. Did hubris blind the U.S. government from taking precautions? Were the neo-conservatives waiting for an attack in the U.S. large enough to justify an all-out invasion and occupation of the oil rich, Islamic territories?
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