Word: binning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...were from the beginning a little too impressed. There were endless warnings that making war on a Muslim nation would succeed only in recruiting more enraged volunteers for bin Laden, with a flood of fierce mujahedin going to Afghanistan to confront the infidel. Western experts warned that the seething "Arab street" would rise up against...
Mullah Omar and bin Laden are animated by a vision. They really do believe--or perhaps did believe--that their destiny was to unite all the Muslim lands from the Pyrenees to the Philippines and re-establish the original caliphate of a millennium ago. Omar took the sacred robe, attributed to Muhammad and locked away for more than 60 years, and triumphantly donned it in public as if to declare his succession to the Prophet's earthly rule. (Osama harbored similar fantasies about himself, although he fed Omar's, as a form of flattery and enticement...
...videotaped bin Laden coffee klatch has the distinctive atmosphere of evil with its feet up--sated, self-satisfied, laughing. It's a disturbing impression...
Mafiosi, of course, do not punctuate their conversation with "Allah is great!" and "Praise Allah!" The bin Laden home movie mixes ejaculations of piety with postgame Islamic towel snapping and a chillingly cynical amusement at the sucker martyrs. Combine the piety and the thug's mirth, and you get something of that lounging insolence with which Satan, at the opening of the Book of Job, answers God's "Whence comest thou?" with: "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it." A sneering theological swagger. Evil usually feels comfortable with itself...
...cannot watch the tape without thinking of Hannah Arendt's famous phrase "the banality of evil." Because 9/11 has caused such reverberations in the world, people have subconsciously endowed bin Laden with the size and force, the diabolical cunning, of a supervillain or, in some parts of the world, of a superhero. The video produces a severely diminishing effect--something like listening to the Nixon Oval Office tapes (though radically different orders of crime are under discussion). The grainy video brings down the image of bin Laden in something of the way that the Taliban blew up the giant statues...