Dynamical Systems and Meaningful Connections
       As visitors to this Web Site are well aware, I have a deep interest in American civilization as a dynamical system, particularly as it is supported by network theory as a scientific application in the study of Chaos Theory. It is in this context that I address the subject of 'interesting connections.' The 'connections' I choose to address in this essay are those between the three current candidates for the 2008 presidential election - Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama, and John Sidney McCain III--and their dangerous adversaries in the epochal contest of survival between America and leaders of the global Salafist Islamic jihad - Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Osama bin Laden, as described in Lawrence Wright's seminal book on the subject [1], 'The Looming Tower.'
       The first attempt at this set of meaningful 'connections' is to address where each of these 'actors' were and what they were doing during the period centered on 1966 [plus or minus a few years], the year that Sayyid Qutb was martyred by Gamal Abdul Nasser, the then-ruler of Egypt.
The Role of Sayyid Qutb - The Martyr
       The syndicated columnist, Austin Bay, provides a succinct summary of the relationship between Qutb, al-Zawahiri, and bin Laden [2]. "Al Qaeda's dark genius - or, more accurately, the dark genius of the Egyptian strain of international jihadism - has been to connect the Muslim world's angry, humiliated and isolated young men with a utopian fantasy preaching the virtue of violence. That utopian fantasy seeks to explain and then redress [many centuries] of Muslim decline. The rage energizing al-Qaeda's ideological cadres certainly predates the post-Desert Storm presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia…After the terrorist attacks on America of September 11, 2001, the popular press focused on Osama bin Laden's Saudi money rather than Zawahiri's Egyptian militancy, but together the Saudi-Egyptian link was the combination that forged al-Qaeda operationally and philosophically."
       "Zawahiri's inspiration, mentor, and fellow Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, is the modern father of jihadist rage and violence. Counter-terror experts have long acknowledged Qutb's resilient appeal. In his book, 'Assassins and Zeolots,' terror expert Stephen Sloan notes that Qutb 'demonized' Western and secular Muslim leaders 'as agents of revived jahiliyah [pre-Islamic heathenism] who…could be attacked at will by true believers.'" Bay then summarizes Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, which examines the three principal actors in this narrative. "Qutb visited New York and California, and attended college in Greeley, Colorado [during his two years in the United States (1948-1950)]…Qutb key facts. [He] was born in 1903. He died in 1966 - executed by Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser, at the time a Soviet ally…Qutb's rage fed Zawahiri and ultimately shaped bin Laden. The same rage continues to feed disaffected and isolated young Muslims trapped in corrupt autocracies and denied other political, cultural and aesthetic avenues of expression." But Austin Bay and others' succinct summaries miss the very important details of Sayyid Qutb's life and his relationship to Zawahiri and bin Laden.
       Lawrence Wright has the details and presents them in a spell-binding narrative style that gives one a complete sense of the motivations, mind set, and emotional energy of and among the protagonist leaders of the Islamic fundamentalist movement. He writes of al-Qaeda that [3] "The most frightening aspect of this new threat was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic. Up against the confidence that Americans placed in modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from the savage pageant of history, the defiant gestures of bin Laden and his followers seemed absurd and even pathetic. And yet al-Qaeda was not a mere artifact of seventh-century Arabia. It had learned to use modern tools and modern ideas, which wasn't surprising, since the story of al-Qaeda had really begun in America, not so long ago."
       Wright details the unintended consequences of Egypt's sending Qutb to America [4]. "Certainly the trip had not accomplished what Qutb's friends in Egypt had hoped. Instead of becoming liberalized by his experience in America, he returned even more radicalized. Moreover, his sour impressions, when published, would profoundly shape Arab and Muslim perceptions of the new world at a time when their esteem for America and its values had been bright."
       "He also brought home a new and abiding anger about race. 'The white man in Europe or America is our number-one enemy,' he declared. 'The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble objectives...We are endowing our children with amazement and respect for the master who tramples  our honor and enslaves us. Let us instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity.'"
       Wright then launches into the theme that has become today's 'conventional wisdom' regarding the reasons for Muslim rage against the West and specifically America. That is, 'modernity' is the answer. Bernard Lewis and others have forwarded this explanation and it has gained traction in nearly every avenue of America's consciousness on the subject of 'Why do they hate us so?' I do not buy this explanation for reasons that will be made explicit later. 'Modernity' is a formulation of the Western mind. It is not the formulation that provided by the leaders of the global Salafist Islamic fundamentalist movement -- from Sayyid Qutb through Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement. In their own words, they intend to renew the Muslim caliphate on its Islamic terms and, once in power, extend it throughout the whole world -- via any means available, including the use of modern technology. Indiscriminate terror is simply the means that is being used at present because it is the only means available to them. This theme will be expanded upon in a forthcoming essay on terror networks.
       Wright tells the fascinating story of Sayyid Qutb's road to martyrdom in Egypt [5]. "In a story that would be repeated again and again in the Middle East, the contest quickly narrowed to a choice between a military society and a religious one. Nasser had the army and the [Muslim] Brother[hood] had the mosques. Nasser's political dream was of a pan-Arab socialism, modern, egalitarian, secular, and industrialized, in which individual lives were dominated by the overwhelming presence of the welfare state. His dream had little to do with the theocratic Islamic government that Qutb and the Brothers espoused. The Islamists wanted to completely reshape society, from the top down, imposing Islamic values on all aspects of life, so that every Muslim could achieve this purest spiritual expression. That could be accomplished only through a strict imposition of the Sharia, the legal code drawn from the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, which governs all parts of life. Anything less than that, the Islamists argued, was not Islam; it was jahiliyya -- the pagan world before the Prophet received his message. Qutb opposed egalitarianism because the Quran stated: 'We have created you class upon class.' He rejected nationalism because it warred with the ideal of Muslim unity. In retrospect, it is difficult to see how Qutb and Nasser could have misunderstood each other so profoundly. The only thing they had in common was the grandeur of their respective visions and their hostility to democratic rule."
       Then things became darker and darker for Qutb's dream. "Nasser threw Qutb in prison for the first time in 1954, but after three months he let him out and allowed him to become the editor of the Muslim Brothers magazine, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin. Presumably Nasser hoped his display of mercy would enhance his standing with the Islamists and keep them from turning against the increasingly secular aims of the new government; he may also have believed that Qutb had been chastened by his time in prison. Like the former king, Nasser always underestimated his adversary's intransigence. "
       "Qutb's revolutionary argument placed nominally Islamic governments in the crosshairs of jihad. 'The Muslim community has long ago vanished from existence,' he contends. It was 'crushed under the weight of those false laws and teachings which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.' Humanity cannot be saved unless Muslims recapture the glory of their earliest and purest expression. 'We need to initiate the movement of Islamic revival in some Muslim country,' he writes, in order to fashion an example that will eventually lead Islam to its destiny of world domination. 'There should be a vanguard which sets out with this determination and then keeps walking the path,' Qutb declared. 'I have written Milestones for this vanguard, which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be materialized.' Those words would echo in the ears of generations of young Muslims who were looking for a role to play in history."
       "From prison, Qutb had been able to regenerate the secret apparatus. The government of Saudi Arabia, fearing the influence of Nasser's revolution, covertly supplied Qutb's group with money and arms, but the movement was riddled with informers. Two men confessed and named Qutb in a plot to overthrow the government and assassinate public figures. Only six months after Qutb left prison, the security police arrested him again at a beach resort east of Alexandria."
       "The trial of Sayyid Qutb and forty-two of his followers opened on April 19, 1966, and lasted nearly three months. 'The time has come for a Muslim to give his head in order to proclaim the birth of the Islamic movement,' Qutb defiantly declared when the trial began. He bitterly acknowledged that the anti-colonialist new Egypt was more oppressive than the regime it had replaced. There was little effort on the part of the judges to appear impartial; indeed, the chief judge often took on the role of the prosecutor, and hooting spectators cheered the grand charade. The only real evidence produced against Qutb was his book, Milestones. He received his death sentence gratefully. 'Thank God,' he declared. 'I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.'"
       "To the very end, Nasser misjudged his flinty adversary. As demonstrators filled the Cairo streets protesting the impending execution, Nasser realized that Qutb was more dangerous to him dead than alive. He dispatched Sadat to the prison, where Qutb received him wearing the traditional red burlap pajamas of a condemned man. Sadat promised that if Qutb appealed his sentence, Nasser would show mercy; indeed, Nasser was even willing to offer him the post of minter of education once again. Qutb refused. Then Qutb's sister Hamida, who was also in prison, was brought to him. 'The Islamic movement needs you,' she pleaded. 'Write the words,' Qutb responded. 'My words will be stronger if they kill me.'"
       "Sayyid Qutb was hanged after dawn prayers on August 29, 1966. The government refused to surrender his corpse to his family, fearing that his grave would become a shrine to his followers. The radical Islamist threat seemed to have come to an end. But Qutb's vanguard was already hearing the music." Indeed, they had. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden, Mohammad Atta and 18 other jihadis, Khaled Shiek Mohammed, and Ramzi Youssef are among the tens of thousands of al-Qaeda jihadists who 'heard the music.' And they attacked America on its own soil -- the first time such an attack had been carried out since 1812 when the British captured, sacked, and burned the nation's capital.

Al-Zawahiri and bin Laden: Their Early Years
       Lawrence Wright provides detailed descriptions of two of the most prominent architects of the global Salafist Islamic fundamentalist movement. He writes [6], "Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man who would lead Qutb's vanguard, grew up in a quiet middle-class suburb called Maadi, five miles south of the noisy chaos of Cairo. "Children quickly filled [his father's] home. The oldest, Ayman, and his twin sister, Umnya, were born on June 19, 1951. The twins were at the top their classes all the way through medical school.
       Ayman al-Zawahiri was an excellent student [7], and invariably earned the respect of his teachers. His classmates thought he was a 'genius, but he was introspective and often appeared to be daydreaming in class...Indeed, Ayman earned perfect grades with little effort...Zawahiri's uncle Mahfouz, the patriarch of the Azzam clan, observed that although Ayman followed the Zawahiri medical tradition, he was actually closer to his mother's side of the family -- the political side. Since the first Egyptian parliament, more than 150 years ago, there have been Azzams in government, but always in the opposition. Mahfouz carried on the tradition of resistance, having been imprisoned at the age of fifteen for conspiring against the government. In 1945 Mahfouz was arrested again, in a roundup of militants following the assassination of Prime Minister Ahmed Mahir. ' I myself was going to do what Ayman has done,' he boasted."
       "Sayyid Qutb had been Mahfouz Azzam's Arabic teacher in the third grade, in 1936, and Qutb and his young protégé formed a lifelong bond. Later, Azzam wrote for the Muslim Brothers magazine that Qutb published in the early years of the revolution. He then became Qutb's personal lawyer and was one of the last people to see him before his execution. Azzam entered the prison hospital where Qutb was preparing to die. Qutb was calm. He signed a power of attorney, awarding Azzam the authority to dispose of his property; then he gave him his personal Quran, which he inscribed -- a treasured relic of the martyr."
       "Young Ayman al-Zawahiri heard again and again from his beloved uncle Mahfouz about the purity of Qutb's character and the torment he had endured in prison [8]. The effect of those stories...[produced in Ayman a] stiff-necked defiance of authority...[that shows his] personal fearlessness, his self-righteousness, and his total conviction of the truth of his own beliefs -- headstrong qualities that would invariably be associated with him in the future and that would propel him into conflict with nearly everyone he would meet. Moreover, his contempt for the authoritarian secular government ensured that he would always be a political outlaw. These rebellious traits, which might have been chaotic in a less disciplined man, were organized and given direction by an abiding mission in his life: to put Qutb's vision into action." And that he did -- in spades!
       "'The Nasserite regime thought that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb and his comrades,' Zawahiri later wrote. 'But the apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb's ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern Islamic jihad movement in Egypt.' Indeed, the same year that Sayyid Qutb went to the gallows, Ayman al-Zawahiri helped form an underground cell devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state. He was fifteen years old."
       Observe that al-Zawahiri reached that age in 1966, the year that Qutb was martyred, within a year of John McCain's first four days as a POW in North Vietnam, Hillary Clinton's first year [1966] at Wellesley after having been indoctrinated into the cultural-Marxist revolutionary philosophy of the Marxist Frankfurt School gurus via the Reverend Donald Jones in her church at the age of 14, and subsequent enrollment at his 'University of Life's philosophy writ large at Wellesley and her anti-Vietnam War speech and organization of campus 'strikes' against the war by the end of her senior year in 1969, and Barack Obama's fifth year of his six years of schooling in a 'disputed' Muslim elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10 years of age [1967-1971].
       "The primary target of the Egyptian Islamists was Nasser's secular regime. In the terminology of jihad, the priority was defeating the 'near enemy' -- that is, impure Muslim society. The 'distant enemy' -- the West -- could wait until Islam had reformed itself. To Zawahiri and his colleagues that meant, at a minimum, imposing Islamic law in Egypt."
       "Zawahiri also sought to restore the caliphate, the rule of Islamic clerics, which had formally ended in 1924 following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but which had not exercised real power since the thirteenth century. Once the caliphate was established, Zawahiri believed, Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading it in a jihad against the West. 'Then history would make a new turn, God willing,' Zawahiri later wrote, 'in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world's Jewish government.'"
       "Nasser died of a sudden heart attack in 1970. His successor, Anwar al-Sadat, desperately needing to establish his political legitimacy, quickly set about making peace with the Islamists. Calling himself the 'Believer President' and 'the first man of Islam,' Sadat offered the Muslim Brothers a deal. In return for their support against the Nasserites and the leftists, he would allow them to preach and to advocate, so long as they renounced violence. He emptied the prisons of Islamists, without realizing the danger they posed to his regime, especially the young Brothers who had been radicalized by the writings of Sayyid Qutb."
       "In October 1973, during the fasting month of Ramadan, Egypt and Syria stunned Israel with simultaneous attacks across the Suez Canal into the occupied Sinai and on the Golan Heights. Although the Syrians were soon beaten back and the Egyptian Third Army was rescued only by UN intervention, it was seen in Egypt as a great face-saving victory, giving Sadat a badly needed political triumph."
       "Nonetheless, Zawahiri's underground cell began to grow -- it had forty members by 1974...[Zawahiri] was a student in the Cairo University medical school, which was aboil with Islamic activism, but Zawahiri had none of the obvious attributes of a fanatic. He wore Western clothes -- usually, a coat and tie -- and his political involvement was almost completely unknown at the time, even to his family. To the few who knew of his activism, Zawahiri preached against revolution, which was an inherently bloody business, preferring a sudden military action designed to snatch the reins of government in a bold surprise."
       "[A close observer of Egyptian politics and a friend of Ayman al-Zawahiri] sensed a shift in the student movement in Egypt. Young Islamic activists were appearing on campuses, first in the southern part of the country, then in Cairo. They called themselves al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya -- the Islamic Group [9]. Encouraged by Sadat's acquiescent government, which covertly provided them with arms so that they could defend themselves against any attacks by Marxists and Nasserites, the Islamic Group radicalized most of Egypt's universities. Different branches were organized along the same lines as the Muslim Brothers, in small cells called 'anqud' -- a bunch of grapes. Within a mere four years, the Islamic Group completely dominated the campuses, and for the first time in the living memory of most Egyptians, male students stopped trimming their beards and female students donned the veil."
       "Eventually the disparate underground groups began to discover one another [10]. There were five or six cells in Cairo alone, most of them with fewer than ten members. Four of these cells, including Zawahiri's, which was one of the largest, merged to form Jamat al-Jihad -- the Jihad Group, or simply al-Jihad. Although their goals were similar to those of the mainstream Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood, they had no intention of trying to work through politics to achieve them. Zawahiri thought such efforts contaminated the ideal of the pure Islamic state. He grew to despise the Muslim Brotherhood for its willingness to compromise."
       After the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini toppled the Peacock Throne of Iran in 1979, Zawahiri and his Islamic revolutionaries had recognized  a great change in their movement [11]. "Islamism was by now a broad and variegated movement, including those who were willing to work within a political system, such as the Muslim Brothers, and those, like Zawahiri, who wanted to wreck the state and impose a religious dictatorship. The main object of the Islamists' struggle was to impose Islamic law -- Sharia. They believe that the five hundred Quranic verses that constitute the basis of Sharia are the immutable commandments of God, offering a road back to the perfected era of the Prophet and his immediate successors -- although the legal code actually evolved several centuries after the Prophet's death. These verses comment upon behavior as precise and various as how to respond to someone who sneezes and the permissibility of wearing gold jewelry. They also prescribe specific punishments for some crimes, such as adultery and drinking, but not for others, including homicide. Islamists say the Sharia cannot be improved upon, despite fifteen centuries of social change, because it arises directly from the mind of God. They want to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a more authentically Islamic legal system that is untainted by Western influence or any improvisations caused by the engagement with modernity.
       Wright describes the plot and aftermath of the successful plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, which was carried out by three young members of the Maadi cell -- supposedly without the auspices of Zawahiri. Nevertheless, Zawahiri was rounded up along with a horde of others and sent to prison [12]. "Security forces greeted the incoming prisoners by stripping them naked, blindfolding and handcuffing them, then beating them with sticks. Humiliated, frightened, and disoriented, they were thrown into narrow stone cells, the only light coming from a tiny square window in the iron door...The screams of fellow prisoners who were being interrogated kept many men in a state of near madness, even when they weren't tortured themselves. Because of his status, Zawahiri was subjected to frequent beatings and other ingenious and sadistic forms of punishment created by Intelligence Unit 75, which oversaw Egypt's inquisition."
       "One line of thinking proposes that America's tragedy on September 11, 2001 was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. The main target of the prisoners' wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society. Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists' rage. Egypt's prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution -- they called it justice -- was all-consuming."
   "Montassir al-Zayyat, an Islamist attorney who was imprisoned with Zawahiri and later became his lawyer and biographer, maintains that the traumatic experiences suffered by Zawahiri in prison transformed him from being a relatively moderate force in al-Jihad into a violent and implacable extremist. Yayyat and other witnesses point to what happened to his relationship with Essam al-Qamari [his military officer friend], who had been his close friend and a man he keenly admired...[and who had escaped every attempt by the Sadat regime to capture him]. [After being severely tortured] Zawahiri colluded with his captors to entrap his friend and did so. As planned, Zawahiri  went to the mosque [the arranged meeting place] and fingered his friend."
       "Zawahiri himself doesn't admit to this in his memoir, except obliquely, where he writes about the 'humiliation' of imprisonment. 'The toughest thing about captivity is forcing the mujahid, under the force of torture, to confess about his colleagues, to destroy his movement with his own hands, and offer his and his colleagues' secrets to the enemy.' Perversely, the authorities placed Qamari in the same cell with Zawahiri after Zawahiri  testified against him and thirteen others. Qamari received a ten-year sentence. 'As usual, he received the news with his unique calmness and self-composure,' Zawahiri recorded. 'He even tried to comfort me, and said, 'I pity you for the burdens you will carry,' In 1988 Qamari was shot to death by police after escaping from prison."
Al-Zawahiri Meets Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan
       In a chapter titled, 'The Founder,' Wright introduces a new player in the drama of the Looming Tower, Osama bin Laden. He starts at the intersection of al-Zawahiri and bin Laden [13]. "At the age of thirty-four [in 1985], Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri was a formidable figure. He had been a committed revolutionary and the leader of an underground Islamist cell for more than half his life. His political skills had been honed by endless prison debates, and he emerged pious, bitter, and determined."
       "Saudi intelligence says that he arrived in the Kingdom in 1985 on a pilgrimage visa, which he converted to a work visa...Zawahiri's attorney, and former prison mate, Montassir al-Zayyat, passed through Jeddah on his way to Mecca, and he found Zawahiri sober and downcast. 'The scars left on his body from the indescribable torture he suffered caused him no more pain,' Zayyat later wrote, 'but his heart still ached from it. In Zayyat's opinion, Zawahiri had fled Egypt because the guilt of betraying his friends weighed so oppressively on his conscience. By testifying against his comrades while he was in prison, Zawahiri had lost his claim to leadership of al-Jihad. He was looking for a place where he could redeem himself and where the radical Islamist movement could gain a foothold. 'The situation in Egypt had been getting worse,' Zawahiri later wrote, 'you can say explosive.'"
       "Zayyat contends that Zawahiri and bin Laden met in Jeddah, and although there is no record of their first encounter, it is certainly likely. Zawahiri had already been to Afghanistan twice, before prison, and intended to return as soon as possible. The pipeline to Afghanistan ran directly through bin Laden's apartment. Anyone who gave money or volunteered for the jihad would have known the enterprising young Saudi, In any case, they were bound to discover each other sooner or later in the intimate landscape of jihad."
       Wright explains the essence of being born into the bin Laden family. [14]. "One cannot understand the scale of the son's ambition without appreciating the father's accomplishment. Remote and powerful but humble in manner, Mohammed bin Awahd bin Laden was a legend even before Osama was born." Wright describes the talents of the prodigal father as he wends his way from small beginnings to the growth of a vast 'construction' empire based on his gaining favor with the ruling class of Saudi Arabia and enriching himself beyond his wildest imagination as the peninsula had become developed by foreigners in search of the 'black gold' of oil beneath the desert floor."
       Alia [Ghanem], a fourteen-year old girl, joined the elder bin Laden's household as the fourth wife, "...a position that is sometimes called the 'slave wife,' especially by the wives with more tenure...By comparison with the other wives, Alia was modern and secular, although like all of bin Laden's wives she was fully veiled in public, not even letting her eyes show through the several layers of black linen. Mohammed bin Laden and Alia's only child was born in Riyadh in January 1958, named Osama, 'the Lion,' after one of the companions of the Prophet."
       During his early years Osama bin Laden enjoyed the privileges of the wealth accumulated by his father. He lived in a more or less 'westernized' environment in Saudi Arabia. According to Wright, "Osama enjoyed television, especially westerns. Bonanza was his favorite show, and he adored Fury, a series about a boy and his silky black stallion…After the death of [his father], the trustee sent most of the sons to Lebanon for their education. Only Osama remained behind, which would always mark him as the most provincial of the bin Laden boys…at the premier school, al-Thagr, Osama was a member of a class of sixty-eight students…All of the students dressed in western clothes - a jacket and tie during the winter, pants and shirt during the rest of the school year. Osama stood out because he was tall and gangly and physically slow to mature. As his classmates began sporting moustaches and goatees, bin Laden remained clean-shaven because his beard was so light. His teachers found him shy and fearful of making mistakes."
       "In Osama's fourteenth year [1972] he experienced a religious and political awakening [15]. Some ascribe the change to a charismatic Syrian gym teacher at the school who was a member of the Muslim Brothers. Osama stopped watching cowboy shows. Outside of school, he refused to wear Western dress. Sometimes he would sit in front of the television and weep over the news from Palestine. 'In his teenage years, he was the same nice kid,' his mother later related. 'But he was more concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general.' He tried to explain his feelings to his friends and family, but his passion left them nonplussed. 'He thought Muslims are not close enough to Allah, and Muslim youth are too busy playing and having fun,' his mother concluded. He began fasting twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, in emulation of the Prophet. He went to bed right after isha, the evening prayer. In addition to the five prayers a day, he set his alarm for one in the morning and prayed alone every night. Osama became quite stern with his younger half siblings, especially about rising early to go to the mosque for the dawn prayer."
       "It was also during this time, in high school, that bin Laden joined the Muslim Brothers. The organization was very much an underground movement in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. 'Only nerds were in it,' a fellow member recalled. The members were highly religious teenagers like bin Laden, and although they were not actively conspiring against the government, their meetings were secret and took place in private homes. The group sometimes went together on pilgrimages to Mecca, or on outings to the beach, where they would proselytize and pray. 'We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,' said Jamal Khashoggi, a friend of bin Laden's who joined the Brotherhood at about the same time. 'We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.'"
       "It was a time of spiritual questioning for both of them [16]. 'Islam is different from any other religion; it's a way of life,' said Khalifa. 'We were trying to understand what Islam has to say about how we eat, who we marry, how we talk. We read Sayyid Qutb. He was the one who most affected our generation.' Many of the professors at the university [in Saudi Arabia] were members of the Brotherhood who had been run out of Egypt or Syria. They had brought with them the idea of a highly politicized Islam, one that fused the state and the religion into a single, all-encompassing theocracy. Bin Laden and Khalifa were drawn to them because they seemed more open-minded than the Saudi scholars and were willing to lead them to the books that would change their lives, such as Qutb's Milestones and In the Shade of the Quran. Each week, Mohammad Qutb, the younger brother of the martyr, would lecture at the school. Although bin Laden never formally studied with Qutb, he usually attended his public lectures. Qutb was extremely popular with the students, who noted his calm demeanor despite the fact that he had also endured the rigors of Nasser's prisons."
       "At that moment Mohammed Qutb was jealously defending his brother's reputation, which was under attack from moderate Islamists. They contended that Milestones had empowered a new, more violent group of radicals, especially in Egypt, who used Sayyid Qutb's writings to justify attacks on anyone they considered an infidel, including other Muslims. Foremost among Qutb's critics has Hasan Hudaybi, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brothers, who published his own prison book, Preachers Not Judges, to counter Qutb's seductive call to chaos. In Hudaybi's far more orthodox theology, no Muslim could deny the belief of another so long as he made the simple profession of faith: 'There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His messenger.' The debate, which had been born in the Egyptian prisons with Qutb and Hudaybi, was quickly spreading throughout Islam, as young Muslims took sides in this argument about who is a Muslim and who is not. 'Osama read Hudaybi's book in 1978, and we talked about it,' Jamal Khalifa recalled. 'Osama agreed with him completely.' His views would soon change, however, and it was this fundamental shift -- from Hudaybi's tolerant and accepting view of Islam to Qutb's narrow and judgmental one -- that would open the door to terror."
       In a chapter of his book entitled, 'Change,' Wright describes how Osama bin Laden became involved in Afghanistan [17]. "On Christmas Eve 1979 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. 'I was enraged and went there at once,' bin Laden later claimed. 'I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.' According to Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden had never even heard of the country of Afghanistan until that point and did not actually go there until 1984, which is when he first became noticed in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bin Laden explained the trips he made before then were 'a big secret, so that my family wouldn't find out.' He became a courier, he said, delivering charitable donations from wealthy Saudis. 'I used to hand over the money and head straight back, so I wasn't really familiar with what was going on."
       In a summary of bin Laden's leadership of his men during the Soviet/Afghan conflict, Austin Bay writes [18], "Mr. Wright documents bin Laden's inept record during the Afghan war against the Soviets. Hardened mujahideen regarded bin Laden as a buffoon and a poseur." Indeed, all bin Laden actually did of note during that war was to supply money and recruit mujahids. The Afghan warlords did the fighting. The bin Laden Arabs were looked on as 'buffoons' by the Afghans.
What Was Hillary Rodham Clinton Doing in 1966?
       Barbara Olson probably knew Hillary Rodham Clinton as well or better than any author who has written about her. In her 1999 book she says that [19] "I came to know Hillary Rodham Clinton when I served as the chief investigative counsel for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, then chaired by the distinguished gentlemanly William F. Clinger. For months, five of us investigated the FBI and Travel Office scandals…The members of my seasoned investigative staff would each tell you they have never seen anyone better able to keep her stories, however improbably, straight. She was unflappable when presented with damning evidence and was adept at darting nimbly to a new interpretation that put that damning evidence in the best light."
       "I have never experienced a cooler or more hardened operator than Hillary Rodham Clinton. The investigators working for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr found, as we did, that in one White House scandal after another, all roads led to Hillary. To investigate White House improprieties and scandals, the evidence necessarily led to her hidden hands guiding the Clinton operation. We came to see that, essentially, Hillary is a woman animated by a lifelong ambition. That ambition is to make the world accept the ideas she embraced in the sanctuaries of liberation theology, radical feminism, and the hard left….Hillary Clinton rose to the top ranks of the radical left, and who now seeks to foment revolutionary changes from the uniform of a pink suit."
       Olson continues [20]. "Like so many politicians, the need for elected office had come early to her. She had become vice president of her junior class in high school. She was elected to student government twice in college. The second time as president of her class at Wellesley, a position that allowed her to make a grandiose, cant-laden commencement speech that transformed her into a radical celebrity."
       Hillary's high school years are telling [21]. "Hillary Rodham - as she was known until she changed her name after a half-dozen years of marriage - seems to have been born ambitious. The same focused young woman keeps appearing throughout the pages of Eyrie, the Maine South High School yearbook, and Southawards, the school paper. Here she is in 1963, a sophomore and class council representative. There she is as a junior, on the Cultural Values committee.Think about that!" Observe that in 1965, Hillary graduated from high school - about two years before John McCain became a POW in North Vietnam.
       "Hillary is the daughter of Hugh and Dorothy Rodham, middle-class and comfortable who have been established in Park Ridge, Illinois, since Hillary was four. Park Ridge is a suburb of Chicago, white and conservative, mid-America in the middle of America…She's a daddy's girl. A Goldwater girl…By her senior year [1965], Hillary was in full stride: She was class council vice president, served on the Pep Club, won a science award, excelled at speech and debate, received the Daughters of the American Revolution Award for citizenship, and was a National Merit finalist."
       Olson reveals that [22] "…somewhere, something wasn't quite right. The daddy's girl would soon become a feminist activist and critic of the nuclear family. In November 1973 Hillary Rodham wrote an article for the Harvard Educational Review that advocated a radical expansion of the rights of children. In it, Hillary Rodham revealed an important aspect of her political agenda: Support for the liberation of children from 'the empire of the father.'" Hilary had by then become a man-hater - the foundation of radical feminism. Why would this happen?
       The answer is in the mannerism of her overbearing father. "Hugh Rodham was a salty, tobacco-chewing, self-made man, whose primary way of showing affection was through sarcasm and whose instant response to any achievement by his overachieving daughter was to dismiss it and raise the bar even higher. Hillary had to jump high to be daddy's favorite…The Rodhams were married in 1942. Their first child, Hillary, was born in 1947…Hillary portrays her father as hard, cold, and demanding. She proudly showed her father report cards with a column of A's. His reaction was always, 'You must go to a pretty easy school.'"
       "Hugh was the kind of father whose withholding of affection may have inspired overachievement, but it also seems to have created a reservoir of resentment for a young woman who would later write a whole book about the value of nurturing. Hillary fantasized early on with becoming an astronaut…If the heavens were closed to her, the next world was not. She followed the example of her father, a devout Methodist who taught his children to kneel by their beds and pray every night. 'We attended a big church with an active congregation, the First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge,' Hillary wrote. 'The church was a center for preaching and practicing the social gospel, so important to our Methodist traditions. Our spiritual life as a family was spirited and constant. We talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied and argued with God.'"
       "At an early age, Hillary absorbed the lessons of the Methodist church, and was shaped by the power of its social gospel. The United Methodists now claim more members than the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and American Baptists combined, dominating the National Council of Churches…In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Methodist theology, awakened by the powerful assertions of social science, began to stir a new awakening to the issues of class and race. The compelling power of this new social gospel had resonated with the Methodist commitment to the quest for human perfectibility."
       "Also, of all the denominations, Methodism perhaps had gone the farthest in advocating the 'Social Creed' and its quasi-socialist concept of progress. Of all the denominations, Methodism had been the most militant opponent of the saloon and advocate of temperance and prohibition. It was this strain of Methodism, the deep eddies of the Christian left, that gave Hillary Rodham her moral and political bearings and perhaps her highly attuned sense of self-righteousness…It became the root of her worldview, one in which it is never enough to attack an opponent's actions. One must also expose his motives, and use that perspective to destroy both the action and its proponents. For the natural companion of a doctrine of perfectibility is a conviction in the existence of evil - and immorality - of one's enemies. Hillary's America is a starkly Manichean universe, one in which she perceives the enemies of progress as numerous, powerful, and clever - in fact, as the 'vast right-wing conspiracy.'"
       Then Hillary met the Reverend Don Jones, and it was that meeting that began the external change in the Goldwater girl, a change into the cultural-Marxism that would later engulf American universities via the Frankfurt School revolutionaries. In a section of the book, entitled 'The University of Life,' Olson writes [23], "Hillary was a fourteen-year-old ninth grader when the Reverend Donald G. Jones arrived as the new youth minister. He was an intense, energetic thirty-year-old, newly minted from divinity school in Manhattan. The students, not Jones, called the class 'The University of Life.' It was an apt name, for the Reverend Jones possessed an expansive mission to open his students to his view of the wider world and transform them."
       "Don Jones was determined to break open the comfortable cocoon of Park Ridge and expose his protégés to the disturbing realities of the contemporary world. He brought in an atheist to debate the existence of God. He upset the congregation with a discussion of teenage pregnancy. He conveyed his deep commitment to the theology of Paul Tillich, who redefined Christianity in terms of the German idealistic tradition and existentialism. Jones, believed, as Tillich wrote, that the major flaw of contemporary Christianity was its deep roots in middle-class culture. Its revival, Tillich argued, could come only from a critique of society that took its inspiration from Marxist lines of thought." Of course this is none other than the cultural-Marxist thought that migrated to America's shores from the Frankfurt School from Germany in the 1930s and later captivated the Boomer elites in our universities as they came into young adulthood in the 1960s. Critical theory was the weapon that would be used to create a revolution that Antonio Gramsci would boast 'could not be reversed, even with the use of force.'
       "In this new spin on Christianity, sin and grace, death and redemption were no longer the key features of theology. The major problem facing American youth, the Reverend Jones informed his students, was a crisis of meaning and alienation. Hillary carried this forward to her 'politics of meaning.' The reverend Jones jolted his students with a bracing mixture of counterculture and high culture…He drew explicit parallels between the utopia of Karl Marx and the heavenly kingdom."
       "Two years after coming to Park Ridge, the Reverend Jones went on to teach in New Jersey, eventually becoming a professor of theology at Drew University. Many of his congregants were glad to see him go, regarding him as a radical leftist preacher of the 'social gospel.' But he had left a process of change within the girl who had once been crestfallen when Barry Goldwater had lost in his race for the presidency. She no longer trusted the 'conscience of a conservative,' but found herself thinking more and more in terms of mass social action, of a Christian socialism where the restraints of Christianity gradually gave way to the demands of politics and power."
       Hillary graduated from high school and entered Wellesley. Olson describes the transition [24]. "As far as connecting with the currents of liberalism, Wellesley in the late 1960s was the 'university of life' writ large…Hillary participated in antiwar marches in Boston…She had gone home to Chicago in time to witness the bloody clash [1968] between Mayor Daley's police and antiwar protestors…[she] opposed and detested the war and organized a student strike [against it]…By her senior year [1969], the time had come to do more than advocate. The time had come for Hillary to run for office…and [won]. And from this beginning, Hillary Rodham Clinton - the 1969 Vietnam War protester - started her climb to the presidency via the 2008 election.
What Was Barack Hussein Obama Doing in 1966?
       A firestorm of controversy arose in the Democrat Party's presidential primary campaign of 2008 when Insight Magazine published a critique [25] of Obama's early school years. It asked the question, "Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage? This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama."
       The article then continued to report that "An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia. 'He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,' the source said. 'His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign."
       "Sources said the background check, conducted by researchers connected to Senator Clinton, disclosed details of Mr. Obama's Muslim past. The sources said the Clinton camp concluded the Illinois Democrat concealed his prior Muslim faith and education. The background investigation will provide major ammunition to his opponents,' the source said. 'The idea is to show Obama as deceptive."
       "In [Obama's autobiographies] he mentions but does not expand on his Muslim background, alluding only to his attendance at a 'predominantly Muslim school.' The sources said the young Obama was given the name Hussein by his Muslim father, which the Illinois Democrat rarely uses in public. His father was black and came from Kenya. Mr. Obama's [white] mother, the daughter of a farmer, came from Wichita Kansas. Mr. Obama's parents divorced when he was two years old. His father returned to Kenya."
       "Later, Mr. Obama's mother married an Indonesian student and the family moved to Jakarta. Mr. Obama returned to Hawaii when he was 10 to live with his maternal grandparents. The sources said the background check concerned Mr. Obama's years in Jakarta. In Indonesia, the young Obama was enrolled in a Madrassa and was raised and educated as a Muslim. Although Indonesia is regarded as a moderate Muslim state, the U.S. intelligence community has determined that today most of these schools are financed by the Saudi Arabian government and they teach a Wahhabi doctrine that denies the rights of non-Muslims."
       "Although the background check has not confirmed that the specific Madrassa Mr. Obama attended was espousing Wahhabism, the sources said his Democratic opponents believe this to be the case - and are seeking to prove it. The sources said the opponents are searching for evidence that Mr. Obama is still a Muslim or has ties to them."
       This, of course, is right out of the 'book of dirty tricks' that the Clinton 'War Room' had become so noted for over the first eight years of 'their' presidency in the 1990s. And it is, indeed, right out of Hillary's previously noted 'ingrained highly attuned sense of self-righteousness.' If one were to challenge her, that would amount to one with an evil motive and, therefore, marked for destruction - on her road to power at the highest level of government.
       The Insight Magazine article goes on to note that "…Mr. Obama says, 'I was not raised in a religious household.' He describes his mother as secular, but says she had copies of the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita in their home. [He] says his father was 'raised a Muslim,' but by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist…' Mr. Obama also describes his father as largely absent from his life. He says his Indonesian stepfather was 'skeptical' about religion and 'saw religion as not particularly useful in the practical business of making one's way in the world…'"
       "In his book, Mr. Obama briefly addresses his education in Indonesia. 'During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin's call to evening prayer than she was whether I was properly learning my multiplication tables."
       Nevertheless, a great amount of effort was expended by the mass media to ascertain the truth of the charges described above. The Washington Post, The Examiner, CNN Television, and many Internet organizations (including Beliefnet), and numerous bloggers went to great lengths to ascertain the details. One industrious blogger even went to Jakarta and interviewed residents of a street, 'Dempo Street,' to determine whether or not Barack and his stepfather/mother ever lived there and whether or not there was a Mosque in the neighborhood, etc. None of this either proved or disproved the allegations made by the Clinton campaign as reported through the right-wing Insight Magazine.
       There is, however, some evidence that Obama has used his 'Muslim connection' to what he perceives as an advantage over his opponents, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain in the 2008 presidential election campaign. For example, Bill Sammon of The Examiner, writes [26], "When Obama was 2 years old, his parents divorced and his father moved away from the family's home in Hawaii. Four years later, his mother married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, who moved his new wife and stepson to Jakarta…Obama's stepfather was a practicing Muslim."
       "'During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school,' Obama wrote in 'The Audacity of Hope…' 'Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths,' Obama recalled. 'He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us. It was to Lolo that I turned to for guidance and instruction,' Obama Recalled. 'He introduced me as his son.'"
       "Later in life…he was drawn to the writings of an influential American Muslim who served as spokesman for the militant Nation of Islam. 'Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different,' Obama wrote. 'His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.' He added: 'Malcolm's discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation.'"
       "Obama's family connections to Islam would endure…For example, his brother Roy opted for Islam over Christianity, as Obama recounted when describing his 1992 wedding. 'The person who made me proudest of all,' Obama wrote, 'was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol.'"
       "Although the overwhelming majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, Obama does not believe that any one religion should define the United States. 'We are no longer a Christian nation,' he argues in 'Audacity,' … 'We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim natin, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.'"
       "Obama calls the Iraq war 'a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country.' He is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in the U.S. 'In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans…have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging,' he laments. 'I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
       In this regard, The Washington Post quotes a statement by Ibrahim Hooper, communications director on American-Islamic Relations [27], a Washington-based civil rights and advocacy group for Muslims. "It's good for America to have a president who has diversity at many levels in his background. That would be a benefit in reaching out to the rest of the world, particularly the Islamic world.' But that kind of thing provides talking points for political detractors."
       Obama publicly embraces such an idea, that is, that a person with a personal background perspective in things 'Muslim' would be an asset for the presidency of the United States of America. In an exclusive interview with Dan Gilgoff of Beliefnet.com, Obama stated [28], "I absolutely believe that having lived in a country that was majority Muslim for a time and having distant relatives in Africa who are Muslim, that I'm less likely to demonize the Muslim faith and more likely to understand that they are ordinary folks who are trying to figure out how to live their lives and raise their kids and prosper just like anybody else. And I do think that that cultural understanding is something that could be extremely valuable." Yes, maybe for an academic professor, an intelligence expert on Islam and the global Salafist Islamic jihad, or a bureau chief covering the Middle East for some media publication, or some other such 'trivial' pursuit - but as a 'litmus test' for the presidency, NOT ON YOUR LIFE!
       Wow! That is some kind of 'understanding' for an eight-year-old/ten-year-old to pick up from having been educated in a Muslim pre-school in his innocent youth! Maybe we should take William Buckley's advice and just pick our next president 'randomly out of the phone book.'
Conclusion
       As explained at the introduction to this essay, I am interested in the 'important connections' that exist among the major 'actors' on the stage of our 2008 presidential electoral process. For this essay the important linkages are recalled for these actors at a fixed time in history - the year 1966 or thereabouts - that provides a snapshot of their lives that contributed to making them who they are: the makeup of their worldviews, their personalities, their experiences which impact on the contest in this important election year. There will be other such 'snapshots' in subsequent issues of this journal - for the same six 'actors,' but at different time periods. Who knows, we might find something of interest here. In fact, we may even learn something further about American civilization as a dynamical system - one that could be expected to exhibit behavior for such systems under the science of Chaos Theory - either at a stable fixed point, points of stable equilibrium, or pure random 'chaotic' behavior.
       What we observe from the historical narrative developed above is that Osama bin Laden was a more or less 'westernized' teenager while growing up and in the 1966 time frame was watching American movies on television and playing soccer. He wore western clothes to high school and was clean-shaven. It wasn't until 1972 (when he was 14 years old), that Obama had his religious and political awakening - to a rigid Sharia form of Islam and his introduction to the Muslim Brotherhood. This was also the year that the torture regime for our POWs in North Vietnam was essentially eliminated and a year before their release and return to the United States.
       Also during 1966, Ayman al-Zawahiri formed his cell of the al-Jihad branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt at the age of 15 years -- in the same year that Sayyid Qutb was martyred by Nasser in Egypt. This was within a year [1967] of John McCain's first four days as a POW in North Vietnam, during which he absolutely and grossly violated the Code of Conduct for POWs and gave the enemy military information in return for medical treatment of his grave shootdown wounds - wounds from which he would most likely have died if left unattended. It was also Hillary Clinton's first year [1966] at Wellesley after having been indoctrinated into the cultural-Marxist revolutionary philosophy of the Frankfurt School gurus via the Reverend Donald Jones in her church at the age of 14, and subsequent enrollment in his 'University of Life's philosophy writ large at Wellesley and her anti-Vietnam War speech and organization of campus 'strikes' against the war by the end of her senior year in 1969, and Barack Obama's fifth year of his six years of schooling in a 'disputed' Muslim elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10 years of age [1967-1971].
       The above historical narrative provides insight into why (by this time frame, 1966) five of the 'actors' [Qutb was martyred in that year] formulated a strong sense of 'self-righteousness' - a characteristic that has marked them in their pursuits after 1966. But from varied sources. Osama bin Laden from his 'spiritual awakening' as he gravitated to the doctrines of Sayyid Qutb and his joining the Muslim Brotherhood, even though the latter had Egyptian origins. Al-Zawahiri found his 'self-righteousness' from his years in an Egyptian prison, being tortured to the point of turning in members of his own al-Jihad cell, formed since he was 15 years old. Nasser imprisoned those that were 'turned in' and nearly wiped out the movement.
       John McCain's 'self-righteousness' may have resulted from his early years of 'railing against authority' but was surely reinforced by his experiences under confinement as a prisoner of war. Hillary Clinton's 'self-righteousness' resulted, as described above by Barbara Olson, from her religious foundation at an early age and, later on, under the tutelage of her cultural-Marxist young minister, the Reverend Don Jones. Barack Obama's source was undoubtedly his grounding in the black liberation movement by his young adult admiration of the writings of  Malcolm X and by Reverend Jerimiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ in suburban Chicago.
       It will be of great interest to see how the characteristics of these 'actors' on the world stage will turn out - not only for the 2008 presidential election, but for setting the stage for the crowning event, (the next Social Moment) in America's history. We are now in the middle stages of a Fourth Turning, which the history of America's future predicts [29],[30] can either result in a new beginning  -- a road to greater prosperity or a road of decay into chaotic anarchy. One truth that cannot be denied, however, in this prediction. America will not descend into decay and ruin by anything that the global Salafist Islamic jihad can or will visit on us. That road can only result from such decay by victory for our 'enemies within,' the cultural-Marxist elites of the Boomer generation.
       While America's fighting men were winning the Cold War, by battles in Korea [1950s] and Vietnam [1960s and early 1970s], our 'enemies within' were winning the culture war at home - while America slept. While we slept! They brought their counter-culture revolution to our campuses during the 1960s. They further attempted to cement it in place during the 1990s with their 'march through the institutions.' The 2008 election will tell us whether or not these 'enemies' will continue to erode and ultimately destroy - in the words of Abraham Lincoln - the 'world's last best hope.'
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Footnotes:
1)  Wright, Lawrence, "The Looming Tower" al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
2)  Bay, Austin, "Al Qaeda's Egyptian ideological origins," The Washington Times, 29 December 2006.
3)  Ibid, Wright, pp. 6.
4)  Ibid, Wright, pp. 23.
5)  Ibid, Wright, pp. 27.
6)  Ibid, Wright, pp. 32.
7)  Ibid, Wright, pp. 36-37.
8)  Ibid, Wright, pp, 37.
9)  Ibid, Wright, pp. 41.
10) Ibid, Wright, pp. 42-44.
11) Ibid, Wright, pp. 47.
12) Ibid, Wright, pp. 50-59.
13) Ibid, Wright, pp. 60.
14) Ibid, Wright, pp. 71.
15) Ibid, Wright, pp. 75.
16) Ibid, Wright, pp. 79-80.
17) Ibid, Wright, pp. 94.
18) Bay, Austin, "Al-Qaeda's Egyptian ideological origins," The Washington Times, 29 December 2006.
19) Olson, Barbara, "Hell to Pay: The unfolding story of Hillary Rodham Clinton," pp. 2-5, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1999.
20) Ibid, pp. 5.
21) Ibid, pp. 23-30.
22) Ibid, pp. 25-30.
23) Ibid, pp. 31-39.
24) Ibid, pp. 35.
25) "Hillary's team has questions about Obama's Muslim background," Insight Magazine, 16-22 January 2007.
26) Sammon, Bill, "Can a past of Islam change the path to president for Obama," Examiner.com, 29 January 2007.
27) Bacon, Jr., Perry, "Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him," The Washington Post, 29 November 2007.

28) Gilgoff, Dan, "Barack Obama: Praying to Be 'An Instrument of God's Will,'" Beliefnet, http://www.com/story/228/story_22894_2.html, Undated.
29) Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069," William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991.
30) Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, "The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny," Broadway Books, 1997.
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