370 quotes found
"In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Donald Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed, and al-Qaida wasn't present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the primary beneficiary from his killing. And the war continued after that for approximately one decade. But after it became clear to you that it was an unjust and unnecessary war, you made one of your greatest mistakes, in that you neither brought to account nor punished those who waged this war, not even the most violent of its murderers, Rumsfeld."
"“We will fight him with faith”"
"“What I lived in two years there[Afghanistan], I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere”- 1993 Independent article"
"It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, Philippines, Pattani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn't respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its' allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves. The people of Islam awakened and realized that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about "Human Rights" were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world."
"“You left [Somalia] carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you”"
"“The Iraqi children are our children”(Bin Laden claimed America are killing his children by sanctions on Iraq)"
"More than 600,000 Iraqi children have died due to lack of food and medicine and as a result of the unjustifiable aggression (sanction) imposed on Iraq and its nation. The children of Iraq are our children. You, the USA, together with the Saudi regime are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent children. Due to all of that, what ever treaty you have with our country is now null and void."
"First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula."
"The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim."
"The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousands of its troops to the land of the two Holy Mosques over and above its meddling in its affairs and its politics, and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical regime that is in control. These are the reasons behind the singling out of America as a target. And not exempt of responsibility are those Western regimes whose presence in the region offers support to the American troops there. We know at least one reason behind the symbolic participation of the Western forces and that is to support the Jewish and Zionist plans for expansion of what is called the Great Israel. Surely, their presence is not out of concern over their interests in the region. … Their presence has no meaning save one and that is to offer support to the Jews in Palestine who are in need of their Christian brothers to achieve full control over the Arab Peninsula which they intend to make an important part of the so called Greater Israel."
"After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. … As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger."
"Any effort directed against America and the Jews yields positive and direct results, Allah willing. It is far better for anyone to kill a single American soldier than to squander his efforts on other activities."
"We believe that this administration represents Israel inside America. Take the sensitive ministries such as the Ministry of Exterior and the Ministry of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper hand in them. They make use of America to further their plans for the world, especially the Islamic world. American presence in the Gulf provides support to the Jews and protects their rear. And while millions of Americans are homeless and destitute and live in abject poverty, their government is busy occupying our land and building new settlements and helping Israel build new settlements in the point of departure for our Prophet's midnight journey to the seven heavens. America throws her own sons in the land of the two Holy Mosques for the sake of protecting Jewish interests."
"I am one of the servants of Allah. We do our duty of fighting for the sake of the religion of Allah. It is also our duty to send a call to all the people of the world to enjoy this great light and to embrace Islam and experience the happiness in Islam. Our primary mission is nothing but the furthering of this religion. ... Let not the West be taken in by those who say that Muslims choose nothing but slaughtering. Their brothers in East Europe, in Turkey and in Albania have been guided by Allah to submit to Islam and to experience the bliss of Islam. Unlike those, the European and the American people and some of the Arabs are under the influence of Jewish media."
"The International Islamic Front for Jihad against the U.S. and Israel has, by the grace of God, issued a crystal-clear fatwah calling on the Islamic nation to carry on jihad aimed at liberating holy sites. The nation of Muhammad has responded to this appeal. If the instigation for jihad against the Jews and the Americans in order to liberate al-Aksa Mosque and the Holy Ka'aba is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal. Our job is to instigate and, by the grace of God, we did that, and certain people responded to this instigation."
"What I know is that those who risked their lives to earn the pleasure of God are real men. They managed to rid the Islamic nation of disgrace. We hold them in the highest esteem."
"Wadih el-Hage was one of our brothers whom God was kind enough to steer to the path of relief work for Afghan refugees. I still remember him, though I have not seen him or heard from him for many years. He has nothing to do with the U.S. allegations. As for Mohamed Rashed al-'Owhali, we were informed that he is a Saudi from the province of Najd. The fact of the matter is that America, and in particular the CIA, wanted to cover up its failure in the aftermath of the events that took place in Riyadh, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Capetown, Kampala--and other places, God willing, in the future--by arresting any person who had participated in the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan. We pray to God to end the plight, and we are confident they will be exonerated."
"There is no doubt that the treacherous attack has confirmed that Britain and America are acting on behalf of Israel and the Jews, paving the way for the Jews to divide the Muslim world once again, enslave it and loot the rest of its wealth. A great part of the force that carried out the attack came from certain gulf countries that have lost their sovereignty. Now infidels walk everywhere on the land where Muhammad was born and where the Koran was revealed to him. The situation is serious. The rulers have become powerless. Muslims should carry out their obligations, since the rulers of the region have accepted the invasion of their countries. These countries belong to Islam and not the rulers."
"Any thief or criminal or robber who enters another country in order to steal should expect to be exposed to murder at any time. For the American forces to expect anything from me personally reflects a very narrow perception. Thousands of millions of Muslims are angry. The Americans should expect reactions from the Muslim world that are proportionate to the injustice they inflict."
"Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims."
"The U.S. knows that I have attacked it, by the grace of God, for more than 10 years now. The U.S. alleges that I am fully responsible for the killing of its soldiers in Somalia. God knows that we have been pleased at the killing of American soldiers. This was achieved by the grace of God and the efforts of the mujahedin from among the Somali brothers and other Arab mujahedin who had been in Afghanistan before that. America has been trying ever since to tighten its economic blockade against us and to arrest me. It has failed. This blockade does not hurt us much. We expect to be rewarded by God."
"Winds of change have blown in order to lift the injustice to which the world is subjected by America and its supporters and the Jews who are collaborating with them. Look at what is happening these days in Indonesia, where Suharto, a despot who ruled for 30 years, was overthrown. The time will come, sooner rather than later, when criminal despots who betrayed God and his Prophet, and betrayed their trust and their nation, will face the same fate."
"We should fully understand our religion. Fighting is a part of our religion and our Shari'a. Those who love God and his Prophet and this religion cannot deny that. Whoever denies even a minor tenet of our religion commits the gravest sin in Islam. Those who sympathize with the infidels-such as the PLO in Palestine or the so-called Palestinian Authority--have been trying for tens of years to get back some of their rights. They laid down arms and abandoned what is called violence and tried peaceful bargaining. What did the Jews give them? They did not give them even 1% of their rights."
"Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God. To call us Enemy No. 1 or 2 does not hurt us. Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty. I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America."
"As for those who condemned these operations looked at the event 9/11] in isolation and failed to connect them to past events and did not look at the causes that lead to this result. So their point of view is narrow."
"In today's wars, there are no morals. We believe the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets."
"I'm fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God. Our fight now is against the Americans."
"I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself. That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States."
"Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people. Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. … It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam."
"Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion. The wind of faith is blowing."
"[H]istory should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents The Twin Towers were legitimate targets, they were supporting US economic power. These events were great by all measurement. What was destroyed were not only the towers, but the towers of morale in that country. blessed by Allah to destroy America's economic and military landmarks If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents and this is legal religiously and logically. The towers were supposed to be filled with supporters of the economical powers of the United States who are abusing the world. Those who talk about civilians should change their stand and reconsider their position. We are treating them like they treated us. There are two types of terror, good and bad. What we are practising is good terror. We will not stop killing them and whoever supports them. Bush and Blair don't understand anything but the power of force. Every time they kill us, we kill them, so the balance of terror can be achieved. It is the duty of every Muslim to fight. Killing Jews is top priority. If America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent."
"We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day. We had finished our work that day and had the radio on. It was 5:30 PM our time. I was sitting with Dr. Ahmad Abu al-Khair. Immediately, we heard the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center."
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse."
"We say our terror against America is blessed terror in order to put an end to suppression, in order for the United States to stop its support to Israel."
"If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists."
"These Jews are masters of usury and leaders in treachery. They will leave you nothing, either in this world or the next."
"Just like you kill us, we will kill you."
"The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam. The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them - peace be upon them all. It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honour, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah's Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language. It is the religion whose book - the Quran - will remained preserved and unchanged, after the other Divine books and messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgment. Allah has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it."
"You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?"
"Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy."
"We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins."
"Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington."
"We also call you to deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of sub dual, theft and occupation, and not to continue your policy of supporting the Jews because this will result in more disasters for you."
"If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: 'Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people. And remove the anger of their [Muslims'] hearts'."
"When the Islamic party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them, and to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them and torture them - a new lesson from the 'American book of democracy'"
"We will continue to fight you as long as we have weapons in our hands."
"There is no dialogue except with weapons."
"This war in Iraq makes millions of dollars for big corporations, either weapons manufacturers or those working in the reconstruction, such as Halliburton and its sister companies. . . It is crystal clear who benefits from igniting the fire of this war and this bloodshed: They are the merchants of war, the bloodsuckers who run the policy of the world from behind the scenes. President Bush and his ilk, the media giants, and the U.N. . . all are a fatal danger to the world, and the Zionist lobby is their most dangerous member. God willing, we will persist in fighting them. . ."
"Every Muslim, from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews and hates Christians. For as long as I can remember, I have felt tormented and at war, and have felt hatred and animosity for Americans."
"The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced. I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy. The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond. In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors. And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children. And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance. This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children - also in Iraq - as Bush Jr did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq's oil and other outrages. So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?"
"As for it's results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and have, by all standards, exceeded all expectations. This is due to many factors, chief among them, that we have found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents. Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterised by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth. This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Sr to the region. At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting. So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretence of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn't forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region's presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty."
"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Each and every state that does not tamper with our security will have automatically assured its own security."
"Contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don't strike for example - Sweden?"
"No, we fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours."
"And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children."
"And it's no secret to you that the thinkers and perceptive ones from among the Americans warned Bush before the war and told him: "All that you want for securing America and removing the weapons of mass destruction - assuming they exist - is available to you, and the nations of the world are with you in the inspections, and it is in the interest of America that it not be thrust into an unjustified war with an unknown outcome.""
"All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah."
"No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again."
"I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers … I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers … with the raids."
"People of America: the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning."
"“ The interests of the Ummah take precedence over the interest of any state, the interests of the state take precedence over the interest of any group, the interests of the group take precedence over any individual”"
"The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles. If you would have seen it with your own eyes, you would have been very pleased, and your heart would have been filled with joy."
"Last year, when the need to form a fact-finding team to undertake a thorough investigation concerning the hidden elements involved in September 11 incident was brought up; an idea also endorsed by all independent governments and nations as well as by the majority in the United States, my country and myself came under pressure and threat by the government of the United States. Instead of assigning a fact-finding team, they killed the main perpetrator and threw his body into the sea. Would it not have been reasonable to bring to justice and openly bring to trial the main perpetrator of the incident in order to identify the elements behind the safe space provided for the invading aircraft to attack the twin world trade towers? Why should it not have been allowed to bring him to trial to help recognize those who launched terrorist groups and brought wars and other miseries into the region? Is there any classified information that must be kept secret?"
"Well, when it was a local problem, the American media did not really care much about it. But until September 11, you saw how this faith of hate, I call it, did to all of us, to New Yorkers and to the rest of the world, honestly. [...] Prince Nayif condemned bin Laden, and other princes... Prince Turki condemned bin Laden. They did not condemn that message. They condemned bin Laden. ... Bin Laden learned this in Saudi Arabia. He didn't learn it in the moon. That message that Bin Laden received, it still is taught in Saudi Arabia. And if bin Laden dies, and this policy or curriculum stays, we will have other bin Ladens."
"If a blasphemer Salman Rushdie can be given the title "Sir" by the West despite the fact he has hurt the feelings of Muslims, then a mujahid Osama bin Laden who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah."
"I would like to emphasize here, on Al-Arabiya TV, that I place Sheik Osama on the same level as my father, and I love him perhaps even more than my father."
"At a time when the name Osama bin Laden had appeared almost nowhere in the Western press, Bennett named the man to beware of. “Among private donors to the new generation [of fighters], Usama Bin Ladin is particularly famous for his religious zeal and financial largesse,” she wrote."
"We know those responsible. In Afghanistan are scores of training camps for the export of terror. Chief amongst the sponsors and organisers is Usama Bin Laden. He is supported, shielded and given succour by the Taliban regime. Two days before the 11 September attacks, Masood, the leader of the opposition Northern Alliance, was assassinated by two suicide bombers. Both were linked to Bin Laden. Some may call that coincidence. I call it payment - payment in the currency these people deal in: blood. Be in no doubt: Bin Laden and his people organised this atrocity. The Taliban aid and abet him. He will not desist from further acts of terror. They will not stop helping him."
"Not only did Islamabad have advance knowledge of the impending strikes, but at the very least it warned the Taliban leadership—whom Islamabad created and is sponsoring—so that they could ensure that bin Laden, Zawahiri, and their lieutenants were not harmed in the strike. According to Arab sources, the ISI even sent a senior official to Afghanistan to personally warn bin Laden about the impending U.S. strike."
"I will screw him in the ass."
"Fighting the inflated menace of Osama bin Laden has become big business, generating hundreds of billions of dollars for government agencies and contractors in what one friend of mine in the Washington policy-making stratosphere calls "the counterterrorist-industrial complex.""
"As a human being, bin Laden may have deserved compassion and even forgiveness, the Dalai Lama said in answer to a question about the assassination of the al-Qaeda leader. But, he said, "Forgiveness doesn't mean forget what happened. … If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures.""
"Osama bin Laden, for all his hatred of American culture, American religion, and American politics, was very fond of American dollars. Hoe did money succeed where gods and kings failed?"
"Remembering the evils of the past helps to sustain the faithful. Yes, the present may look dark, but that, too, is part of the story before the triumph of the faithful, and paradise comes on earth or in heaven. A few weeks after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden released a tape in which he exulted about the destruction of the World Trade Center towers: “Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.” Few people in the West knew that, for him, Muslim degradation had started in the modern age with the abolition of the caliphate. In 1924, in a move that caused little comment in the West, Atatürk, the founder of a new and secular Turkey, had abolished that last office held by the deposed Ottoman sultans. As caliphs they had claimed spiritual leadership of the world’s Muslims. The last one, a gentle poet, had gone quietly into exile. For many Muslims, from India to the Middle East, the abolition was a blow to their dream of a united Muslim world governed according to God’s laws. For Bin Laden and those who thought like him, disunity among Muslims had allowed Western powers to push the Middle East around; to take its oil and, with the establishment of Israel, its land; to corrupt its leaders; and to lead ordinary Muslims astray. The Saudi rulers had committed the ultimate sin of allowing the United States to bring its troops on to the holy land where Muslims had their most sacred sites. Bin Laden's history includes much more than the past eighty years. The Crusades, the defeat of the Moors in Spain, Western imperialism in the nineteenth century, and the evils of the twentieth all add up to a dark tale of Muslim humiliation and suffering. Such history keeps followers angry and motivated and attracts new recruits."
"Though it took a decade to find bin Laden, there is one consolation for his long evasion of justice: He lived long enough to witness what some are calling the Arab Spring, the complete repudiation of his violent ideology."
"In America, we have a figure from history from 1897 named Teddy Roosevelt. He was a wealthy man, who grew up in a privileged situation and who fought on the front lines. He put together his own men–hand chose them–and went to battle. You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt."
"By mid-1998, [CIA analyst Cindy] Storer had long been warning colleagues that bin Laden's organization had the ability to stage simultaneous attacks. On Friday, August 7, she turned out to be right: Major explosions occurred at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. When the attacks were conclusively linked to al-Qaeda, this was, as one operations officer later wrote, a "profound" revelation, in that it showed that bin Laden could conduct "large-scale bombings of U.S. targets." Gradually, the truth was working its way to the agency's seventh floor and to CIA Director George Tenet, who tried to convey to the White House the extent of the threat. A series of plans to capture bin Laden were formed but were rejected by top officials, who worried about how precise the targeting was and the danger of putting civilians at risk."
"As 2000 gave way to 2001, Storer found herself reading terrorist communications that used words like "Olympic-sized" and "Armageddon." In October 2000, suicide bombers in Yemen blew a hole in the w:USS Cole:USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors, and analysts were shocked when the outgoing Clinton administration did not retaliate. In 2001, Tenet began begging the incoming administration of George W. Bush to let the CIA mount an operation that allowed for killing bin Laden rather than capturing him. Analysts expected that another major attack could happen in the summer, and Storer felt responsibility and dread: This is going to happen on your watch."
"Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat the U.S. in a conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we've seen in Iraq–a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult U.S. occupation. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, and increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits. That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, we are playing to script. To change that script, we'll need to make sure that any exercise of American military power helps rather than hinders our broader goals: to incapacitate the destructive potential of terrorist networks and win this global battle of ideas."
"Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda."
"Last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body."
"In May 2011 the United States finally got bin Laden. I felt a great sense of relief and pride as well as gratitude to President Obama for the bold decision to launch the raid that had led to the killing. And I felt vindication for putting into place many of the tools that had led to that day. I always believed that we would get bin Laden."
"We should give him credit for only one thing: unlike other vile tyrants, he did not live in golden palaces, but avoided them."
"Osama Bin Laden and George Bush were both terrorists. They were both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al-Qaeda. The difference is that nobody elected Bin Laden... The United States supported Saddam Hussein and made sure that he ruled with an iron fist for all those years. Then they used the sanctions to break the back of civil society. Then they made Iraq disarm. Then they attacked Iraq. And now they’ve taken over all its assets."
"Few people know that the first INTERPOL Notice for Osama bin Laden was issued in 1998 at the request of Libya, then under Muammar Ghaddafi’s rule. Less than five months later, some 200 people would lose their lives at the hands of al Qaeda in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and in Nairobi, Kenya."
"On the existential plain, Bin Laden was marginalized, out of play, but inside the chrysalis of myth that he had spun about himself he was becoming a representative of all persecuted and humiliated Muslims. His life and the symbols in which he cloaked himself powerfully embodied the pervasive sense of dispossession that characterized the modern Muslim world. In his own miserable exile, he absorbed the misery of his fellow believers, his loss entitled him to speak for theirs, his vengeance would sanctify their suffering."
"In what people irritatingly call "iconic" terms, Bin Laden certainly had no rival. The strange, scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim world. The most tenaciously lasting impression of all, however, is that of his sheer irrationality. What had the man thought he was doing? Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad? ... What happened in Abbottobad … has been the second death of Osama bin Laden. His physical one. Meanwhile, his symbolic, political and ideological [death] had already occurred on the squares of Cairo, Tunis, Damascus and Bengasi, where al-Qaeda had been ignored. Nobody exhalted it. Nobody mentioned it. The "Arab spring" has blossomed and exploded for want of democracy and freedom. It is not provoked by Islamic fanaticism, and even less inspired by the idea of a caliphate... launched by bin Laden. It is not a choice. It is outdated, even if its sporadic followers are still able to strike. Before the Americans, bin Laden had been symbolically killed by the people on Tahrir square and Burghiba avenue."
"The Sheikh has departed, may God have mercy on him, to his God as a martyr and we must continue on his path of jihad to expel the invaders from the land of Muslims and to purify it from injustice. Today, and thanks to God, America is not facing an individual or a group, but a rebelling nation, which has awoken from its sleep in a jihadist renaissance."
"Huey squeals to the Feds’ terrorism hotline -"
"天下共苦戰鬥不休,以有侯王。賴宗廟,天下初定,又復立國,是樹兵也,而求其寧息,豈不難哉!"
"I have collected all the writings of the Empire and burnt those which were of no use."
"Ch'in Shih-huang is going to die! He opened my door, And sat on my floor, He drank my gravy, And wanted some more. He sipped my wine, And couldn't tell what for; I'll bend my bow, And shoot him at the wall. When he arrives at Shach'iu, Then he is going to fall!"
"Qin Shi Huang, also called Shi Huangdi ['First Emperor'] unified China, laying the foundations for what became a vast and enduring state. He founded the short-lived Qin [pronounced 'chin'] Dynasty whose name is the origin of 'China.' He created a centrally-controlled, efficient administration, bound his realm together with new road and canal systems, and defended it with long walls. Yet he ruled with extraordinary brutality."
"Qin Shi Huangdi created the first unified Chinese empire that emerged from the “Warring States Period’. By 221 Bc he had successfully destroyed the last remaining rival kingdoms within China and made himself supreme ruler: the First Emperor. A remarkable, ruthless statesman and conqueror, of manic gifts, haunted by madness, sadism and paranoia, Qin Shi Huangdi’s reign quickly degenerated into a brutal and bloody tyranny. His reputation in China has always been that of a tyrant, but it was Chairman Mao Zedong, another monstrous dictator, who associated himself with the ‘First Emperor’ and promoted him as his glorious precursor."
"I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy."
"Death by hanging...I deserved it and I expected it, as I've always told you. I am glad that I have had the chance to defend myself and to think things over in the last few months."
"This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible."
"We must not be squeamish when we learn that a total of 17,000 have been shot. We are now duty bound to hold together, we who are gathered together here figure on Mr. Roosevelt's list of war criminals. I have the honour of being Number One."
"If the authority of the National-Socialist Reich is to be upheld, then it is unacceptable that representatives of the Reich should be obliged to meet Jews when they enter or leave the house, and are in this way liable to infection with epidemics. I therefore intend to clear the city of Cracow, the seat of the Governor-General of the General Government, of Jews, as far as at all possible, by November 1, 1940. There will be a major operation to move the Jews, on the grounds that it is absolutely intolerable that thousands upon thousands of Jews should go slinking around and occupy apartments in the city which the Führer has granted the great honor of becoming the seat of a high Reich Authority..."
"In Prague, big red posters were put up on which one could read that seven Czechs had been shot today. I said to myself, 'If I had to put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper."
"Let me tell you quite frankly: in one way or another we will have to finish with the Jews. The führer once expressed it as follows: should Jewry once again succeed in inciting a world war, the bloodletting could not be limited to the peoples they drove to war but the Jews themselves would be done for in Europe. If the Jewish tribe survives the war in Europe while we sacrifice our blood for the preservation of Europe, this war will be but a partial success. Basically, I must presume, therefore, that the Jews will disappear. To that end I have started negotiations to expel them to the east. In any case, there will be a great Jewish migration. But what is to become of the Jews? Do you think that they will be settled in villages in the conquered eastern territories? In Berlin we have been told not to complicate matters: since neither these territories, nor our own, have any use for them, we should liquidate them ourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to remain unmoved by pleas for pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever possible, in order to maintain the overall mastery of the Reich here... For us the Jews are also exceptionally damaging because they are being such gluttons. There are an estimated 2.5 million Jews in the General Government, perhaps. 3.5 million. These 3.5 million Jews, we cannot shoot them, nor can we poison them. Even so, we can take steps which in some way or other will pave the way for their destruction, notably in connection with the grand measures to be discussed in the Reich. The General Government must become just as judenfrei (free of Jews) as the Reich!"
"I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories."
"I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right."
"Ah! American cigarettes are like the American soul - sweet and light."
"It doesn't matter whether I'm judged criminal. I have a great feeling of guilt - I have a feeling that I ran after Hitler like a wildfire without reason. If I can sacrifice my life to make something good, I'd gladly do it."
"All these things are still apparent today. You Americans can see for yourselves how impossible it is to feed the German people from the German soil itself. From the viewpoint of a historian, one can say that Hitler never would have arisen if the Allies had not treated Germany so poorly. Justice Jackson said so himself. Today things are more impossible than ever. The East has been taken away from Germany - in other words, hunger created Hitler, and paradoxically, Hitler created still greater hunger."
"After the deed is done, one always becomes clever and philosophical."
"I feel that I am obligated to my people - that is not pessimism. If I tried to prove that I was innocent, it would be the same as trying to prove that the German people are guilty. Only one innocent man sits in that dock - and that man is the symbol of the German people. An epoch with such happenings as the murder of 5 million Jews, the projective extermination of millions of Slavs - such an epoch must close up definitely once and for all. It cannot go dragging on and on. Those of us who are guilty must pay the price and set the German people free, no longer to be blamed for our stupidity."
"You can't indict a government and its organizations as criminal. The conception of the Reich government is a hundred years old. The general staff is several hundreds of years old. The case of the SS is another matter, because it was started with the party and by the party. But it's quite impossible to indict or convict an organization as criminal if it has in its membership millions of innocent people."
"Even in art, there is no light without shadows, and no shadows are cast without some light. Even the shadow of Adolf Hitler is accompanied by some light."
"I think of these things frequently, because I know the German people. Among them might arise the legend of Hitler, because Hitler was not heard from in this trial. Time always has some reconciling effect. On every ruin there eventually grows grass, and then some shrubbery, and finally, before you realize it, what is really an old hideous ruin becomes a romantic sight and legend."
"I think that Hitler was abnormal in his sexual needs. That is, he needed too little from the opposite sex. He considered women as objects of beauty, and he often talked with affection about his own mother. I obtained the impression that he disliked his father, because he never mentioned him. But it is a bad thing if a man has too little Eros in him. It makes him insensitive, and probably leads to cruelty. Freud, Sigmund Freud, the last of the great German psychiatrists, who died in England, pointed out the relationship between frustrated love and cruelty. I believe it is what you psychiatrists term sadism. I'm convinced that a man who does not need the love of a woman, and thinks he can forgo it, or who does forgo it, can turn to cruelty and sadism as a substitute."
"Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered."
"What a horrible system we had. How blind we were."
"A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased."
"On the witness stand I said that a thousand years would not suffice to erase the guilt brought upon our people because of Hitler's conduct in this war. Every possible guilt incurred by our nation has already been, completely wiped out today, not only by the conduct of our war-time enemies towards our nation and its soldiers, which has been carefully kept out of this Trial, but also by the tremendous mass crimes of the most frightful sort which - as I have now learned - have been and still are being committed against Germans by Russians, Poles, and Czechs, especially in East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Sudetenland. Who shall ever judge these crimes against the German people?"
"Hitler is lonely. So is God. Hitler is like God."
"The job of realizing Hitler's vision in the new Government-General fell to a Bavarian named Hans Frank, who had been among the Nazis' earliest recruits from the legal profession. Aged thirty-nine when he installed himself in the historic Wawel Castle in Krakôw, Frank was immediately gripped by delusions of grandeur. He told his wife she was to be the 'queen of Poland', though in practice he was in charge of only the four districts of Krakôw, Radom, Warsaw and Lublin. The Government-General was to become 'the first colonial territory of the German nation'."
"For a while, Himmler and Frank toyed with the idea of sending the Jews to the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, which the Polish government had already considered; it was agreed that this could happen only after the war. Then Hitler spoke of concentrating them on the new Poland's eastern frontier, between the Vistula and the Bug. Later, Siberia was mentioned. In the meantime, the Lublin district became a kind of dumping ground for deported Jews, tens of thousands of whom were crowded into hastily constructed camps, while the supposedly transitional ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Lowicz and Glowno took on a more permanent quality. Not that they could have endured indefinitely. For one thing, they were intolerably cramped; a third of the population of Warsaw was crammed into 2.4 per cent of the city's residential area. At the same time, food rations for Jews were reduced so that by 1941 their daily calorific content was just over 25 per cent of the standard Polish allocation and a meagre 7 per cent of the German, far less than the subsistence minimum. Overcrowding and underfeeding were themselves intended to be lethal - which indeed they were, with mortality rates soaring to 10 per cent in Warsaw in 1941. 'It's high time that this rabble is driven together in ghettos,' declared Himmler, 'and then plague will creep in and they'll croak.' In the summer of 1942 Frank described sentencing 1.2 million Jews to death by starvation as 'just a marginal issue'."
"Yet the more Frank got to know his fiefdom, the more he began to doubt the wisdom of expelling or starving nearly one in ten of the population, to say nothing of the dangers of allowing epidemics to break out in the principal cities. In the early 1930s, Jews had accounted for nearly half of Poland's highest income-earners. A very high proportion of the entrepreneurs, managers and skilled workers of Polish cities were Jewish. One of the first acts of the German occupation had been to authorize the seizure of all Jewish property - the beginning of a campaign of systematic and ruthless plunder. At around the same time Frank had issued an edict imposing a general obligation for forced labour on all male Jews between the ages of twelve and sixty. Whether for their capital or their labour, Jews had an unquestionable economic value; simply stealing the former and eliminating the latter was patently not a profit-maximizing strategy. Unless Frank wanted to return the Polish economy to the Middle Ages, he needed to work out a compromise between the dictates of racist ideology and the economics of empire."
"ATF, all you tyrannical people will swing in the wind one day for your treasonous actions against the Constitution of the United States. Remember the Nuremberg War Trials."
"Being face to face with these people, you realize, they're just people like you."
"A man with nothing left to lose is a very dangerous man and his energy/anger can be focused toward a common/righteous goal. What I'm asking you to do, then, is sit back and be honest with yourself. Do you have kids/wife? Would you back out at the last minute to care for the family? Are you interested in keeping your firearms for their current/future monetary value, or would you drag that '06 through rock, swamp and cactus...to get off the needed shot? In short, I'm not looking for talkers, I'm looking for fighters...And if you are a fed, think twice. Think twice about the Constitution you are supposedly enforcing (isn't "enforcing freedom" an oxymoron?) and think twice about catching us with our guard down – you will lose just like Degan did – and your family will lose.["
"Those who betray or subvert the Constitution are guilty of sedition and/or treason, are domestic enemies and should and will be punished accordingly. It also stands to reason that anyone who sympathizes with the enemy or gives aid or comfort to said enemy is likewise guilty. I have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic and I will. And I will because not only did I swear to, but I believe in what it stands for in every bit of my heart, soul and being. I know in my heart that I am right in my struggle, Steve. I have come to peace with myself, my God and my cause. Blood will flow in the streets, Steve. Good vs. Evil. Free Men vs. Socialist Wannabe Slaves. Pray it is not your blood, my friend."
"Think of it this way. When I was in the Army, you didn't see me for years. Think of me that way now, like I'm away in the Army again, on an assignment for the military."
"Crime is so out of control. Criminals have no fear of punishment. Prisons are overcrowded so they know they will not be imprisoned long. This breeds more crime, in an escalating cyclic pattern."
"Taxes are a joke. Regardless of what a political candidate 'promises', they will increase. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement. They mess up. We suffer. Taxes are reaching cataclysmic levels, with no slowdown in sight."
"The 'American Dream' of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries. Heaven forbid the car breaks down!"
"Politicians are further eroding the 'American Dream' by passing laws which are supposed to be a 'quick fix', when all they are really designed for is to get the official re-elected. These laws tend to "dilute" a problem for a while, until the problem comes roaring back in a worsened form much like a strain of bacteria will alter itself to defeat a known medication."
"Politicians are out of control. Their yearly salaries are more than an average person will see in a lifetime. They have been entrusted with the power to regulate their own salaries, and have grossly violated that trust to live in their own luxury."
"Racism on the rise? You had better believe it! Is this America's frustrations venting themselves? Is it a valid frustration? Who is to blame for the mess? At a point when the world has seen communism falter as an imperfect system to manage people; democracy seems to be headed down the same road. No one is seeing the 'big' picture."
"Maybe we have to contribute ideologies to achieve the perfect utopian government. Remember, government-sponsored health care was a communist idea. Should only the rich be allowed to live long? Does that say that because a person is poor, he is a lesser human being; and doesn't deserve to live as long, because he doesn't wear a tie to work?"
"What is it going to take to open the eyes of our elected officials? America is in serious decline!"
"We have no proverbial tea to dump, should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports? Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that. But it might."
"Should any other person or governing body be able to tell another person that he/she cannot save their own life, because it would be a violation of a law?"
"I strongly believe in a God-given right to self-defense."
"It is a lie if we tell ourselves that the police can protect us everywhere, at all times. Firearms restrictions are bad enough, but now a woman can't even carry Mace in her purse?"
"I'm the NRA."
"The death penalty is what you would call an oxymoron. Death is not a penalty; it's an escape. They treat me like a trophy, like they got me, they’re gonna kill me, and they won. They didn't win. In the crudest terms, 168 to 1."
"I have great respect for human life. My decision to take human life at the Murrah Building – I did not do it for personal gain. I ease my mind in that... I did it for the larger good."
"I like the phrase "shot heard 'round the world," and I don't think there's any doubt the Oklahoma City blast was heard around the world."
"I understand what they felt in Oklahoma City. I have no sympathy for them."
"If there is a hell, then I'll be in good company with a lot of fighter pilots who also had to bomb innocents to win the war."
"You can't handle the truth. Because the truth is, I blew up the Murrah building and isn't it kind of scary that one man could reap this kind of hell?"
"I am sorry these people had to lose their lives. But that's the nature of the beast. It's understood going in what the human toll will be."
"For those diehard conspiracy theorists who will refuse to believe this, I turn the tables and say: show me where I needed anyone else. Financing? Logistics? Specialised tech skills? Brainpower? Strategy? Show me where I needed a dark, mysterious 'Mr X'!"
"If there would not have been a Waco, I would have put down roots somewhere and not been so unsettled with the fact that my government … was a threat to me. Everything that Waco implies was on the forefront of my thoughts. That sort of guided my path for the next couple of years."
"I explain herein why I bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I explain this not for publicity, nor seeking to win an argument of right or wrong. I explain so that the record is clear as to my thinking and motivations in bombing a government installation."
"I chose to bomb a federal building because such an action served more purposes than other options. Foremost, the bombing was a retaliatory strike; a counter attack, for the cumulative raids and subsequent violence and damage that federal agents had participated in over the preceding years (including, but not limited to, Waco.) From the formation of such units as the FBI's 'Hostage Rescue' and other assault teams amongst federal agencies during the '80s; culminating in the Waco incident, federal actions grew increasingly militaristic and violent, to the point where at Waco, our government - like the Chinese - was deploying tanks against its own citizens."
"Knowledge of these multiple and ever-more aggressive raids across the country constituted an identifiable pattern of conduct within and by the federal government and amongst its various agencies. For all intents and purposes, federal agents had become 'soldiers' using military training, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization, and mindset and they were escalating their behavior. Therefore, this bombing was also meant as a pre-emptive or pro-active strike against these forces and their command and control centers within the federal building. When an aggressor force continually launches attacks from a particular base of operation, it is sound military strategy to take the fight to the enemy."
"Additionally, borrowing a page from U.S. foreign policy, I decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile, by bombing a government building and the government employees within that building who represent that government. Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations. Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option. From this perspective, what occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time, and subsequently, my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment. The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy, or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel. I hope that this clarification amply addresses your question. Sincerely, Timothy J. McVeigh. USP Terre Haute (IN)."
"With Oklahoma City being a counterattack, I was only fighting by the rules of engagement that were introduced by the aggressor. Waco started this war. Hopefully Oklahoma would end it."
"A decent person who had allowed rage to build up inside him to the point that he had lashed out in one terrible, violent act."
"Out of this toxic mix of cultism and grifting came Timothy McVeigh, a young, decorated army veteran, subscriber to The Spotlight, gun show enthusiast, and avid fan of Limbaugh's. He had developed a burning hatred of Bill and Hillary Clinton and studied The Turner Diaries like a field manual."
"Nearly everything went according to plan that day for McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, except the most important thing of all: their audacious attack failed to touch off a revolutionary uprising. Yet the fallout from what McVeigh and Nichols conceived as an act of war against the US government did nothing to pause the radicalization of American right-wing politics inside and outside the Republican Party, which continues to this day. As Jeffrey Toobin writes in Homegrown, the story of the Oklahoma City atrocity is "not just a glimpse of the past but also a warning about the future.""
"I can't trust the current government because of fabrications. The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar."
"All conscience dreaming at this moment is asleep. Jared Loughner is conscience dreaming at this moment. Thus, Jared Loughner is asleep."
"My favorite activity is conscience dreaming."
"Firstly, the current government officials are in power for their currency, but I'm informing you for your new currency."
"My hope is for you to be literate. If you're literate in English grammar then you comprehend English grammar. The majority of people who reside in District 8 are illiterate. Hilarious."
"If I have my civil rights then this message wouldn't have happen [sic]."
"In conclusion, my ambition is for informing literate dreamers about a new currency... in a few days, you'll know I'm conscience dreaming."
"Goodbye friends. Please don't be mad at me. The literacy rate is below 5%. I haven't talked to one person who is literate. I want to make it out alive. The longest war in the history of the United States. Goodbye. I'm saddened with the current currency and job employment. I had a bully at school. Thank you. P.S. --plead the fifth!"
"I know who's listening: Government Officials, and the People. Nearly all the people, who don't know this accurate information of a new currency, aren't aware of mind control and brainwash methods. If I have my civil rights, then this message wouldn't have happen [sic]."
"The only thing he said was -- I asked him, I said, what in the world did you do something like this for? And he didn't answer me. And I had my left hand. I was choking him. And the other individual had his knee on the back of his neck. About that time, the other individual put a lot more weight on his neck. And it pushed his face right into the sidewalk. And he hollered, ow, ow, ow, ow. And that was the only thing he said."
"This is a random act of cowardice."
"I don't think it's their fault. It's not the parents' fault. You know, I'd like to think I'm a person that's, you know, somewhat forgiving. And, I mean, they've got to be hurting in this situation as much as anybody."
"What we can legitimately infer is that Loughner is a young man attracted to strong rhetoric, and, from his incoherent YouTube ramblings, he feels that revolutionary violence is the only recourse for change. These sentiments are eerily similar to those one hears from certain media personalities."
"The temptation to jump to the conclusion that Loughner is something of a result of the last two years of political tumult is strong. A number of factors feed the narrative."
"This was an attack not only against dedicated public servants, but against our fellow citizens. As you know, Jared Lee Loughner was subdued by brave quick thinking individuals at the scene. He was taken into custody by sheriff deputies and is now in federal custody."
"This is a tragedy for the whole country."
"I looked at some of the writings of this young man, and from a medical point of view there’s a lot to suggest paranoid schizophrenia and a really sick individual."
"Jared Loughner is the first person to shoot a Congressperson since Rep. Leo Ryan was murdered by the communitarian followers of the Rev. Jim Jones."
"Most criminals do not commit a mass murder for their first crime, and, indeed, Jared Lee Loughner is reported to have been arrested several times — without having been convicted of a crime. Did the police drop the ball? No one can say at this moment."
"Thank God for the violent shooter, one of your soldier heroes in Tucson. God appointed the Afghanistan veteran to avenge himself on this evil nation. However many are dead, Westboro Baptist Church will picket their funerals. We will remind the living that you can still repent and obey. This is ultimatum time with God. Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Luke 13:3. This nation unleashed criminal violent veterans on Westboro Baptist Church for telling you to obey God. We told you at your soldiers' funerals that they are dying for your sins. You hate those words and you will not stop sinning. So you sent violent veterans, so-called patriot guard riders, to attack and try to silence Westboro Baptist Church. Then you sent violent crippled veteran Ryan Newell with 90 rounds of ammunition, planning to shoot five Westboro Baptist Church members while picketing. God restrained the hand of them all, then he turned the violent veteran on you. 22-year-old Jared Loughner opened fire outside a Tucson, Arizona grocery store, shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Federal Judge John M. Roll, and sixteen others. At least six are dead and counting. Congress passed three laws against Westboro Baptist Church. Congresswoman Giffords, an avid supporter of sin and baby-killing, was shot for that mischief. A federal judge in Baltimore, part of the massive military community in Maryland and in the District of Columbia, put Westboro Baptist Church on trial for faithful words from God. Federal Judge Roll paid for those sins with his life. Today, mouthy witch Sarah Palin had Representative Giffords in her crosshairs on her website. She quick took it down, however, because she is a cowardly brute like the rest of you. The crosshairs to worry about are God's and he's put you in his and your destruction is upon you. You should have obeyed. This nation of violent murderers is in full rebellion against God. God avenged himself on you today by a marvelous work in Tucson. He sits in the heavens and laughs at you in your affliction. Westboro Baptist Church prays for more shooters, more violent veterans, and more dead. Praise God for his righteous judgements in this Earth. Amen."
"Why are the feds worried about me clocking on this corner, when there's politicians out here getting popped in Arizona?"
"I simulate various future scenarios relating to resistance efforts, confrontations with police, future interrogation scenarios, future court appearances, future media interviews etc."
"In any case; I would rather have preferred a Ruger Mini 30, but I already own a 7.62 bolt rifle and it is likely that the police wouldn’t grant me a similar caliber. On the application form I stated: “hunting deer”. It would have been tempting to just write the truth; “executing category A and B cultural Marxists/multiculturalist traitors” just to see their reaction:P"
"I took a year off when I was 25 and played WoW [World of Warcraft] PvE hardcore for a year. ... I’m currently playing Modern Warfare 2 casually."
"Stealing [through online piracy] is bad, I admit, but then again, when you have devoted your entire life to a good cause you can allow yourself some naughtiness especially if it can contribute to conserve your funds, cough;). Yes, yes, no ones perfect:P"
"I’ve also scheduled to meet my stepmom ... she’s retired now, so she is currently not in danger of any KT attacks. Although I care for her a great deal, I wouldn’t hold it against the KT if she was executed during an attack against UDI, as she used to be a primary tool and category B traitor for the multiculturalist regime of Norway, high treason she should be familiar with."
"However, since I manifest their worst nightmare (systematical and organized executions of multiculturalist traitors), they will probably just give me the full propaganda rape package and propagate the following accusations: pedophile, engaged in incest activities, homosexual, psycho, ADHD, thief, non-educated, inbred, maniac, insane, monster etc. I will be labeled as the biggest (Nazi-)monster ever witnessed since WW2."
"Hello. To you all good English men and women, just wanted to say that you're a blessing to all in Europe, in these dark times all of Europe are looking to you in surch of inspiration, courage and even hope that we might turn this evil trend with islamisation all across our continent."
"Western Journalists again and again systematically ignore serious Muslim attacks and rather focus on the Jews."
"If one acknowledges that Islam has always oppressed the Jews, one accepts that Israel was a necessary refuge for the Jews fleeing not only the European, but also the Islamic variety of anti- Judaism."
"To send a political activist to an asylum is more sadistic and evil than killing him."
"The Norwegian murderer has shown himself to be as much an enemy of humanity as any jihadist. Indeed, he is a jihadist by any other name. He claims there's a war going on, and there certainly is – a war between civilized people and violent barbarians like him. It sickens me to think that this kind of thing can still happen when it must be obvious to even the most stupid among us that violence will never prevail because it will never win the hearts and minds of the people, the ones who are always left to pick up the pieces. How obvious does that have to be? You'd have to be a moron not to see it, or a fanatic. And, given the parlous state of democracy in Europe today, it's clear that any fundamental change in society is going to require overwhelming public support. Violence immediately snuffs that out like a candle. It's gone. This lunatic has murdered 76 innocent people and drawn hatred upon himself and everything he claims to believe in. He's hated in Norway. He's hated everywhere, as much as the suicide bombers in London and New York were hated and still are, and as much as any fanatical zealot who thinks they have the right to play God. Violence is not the answer. It's never the answer. And we will never progress as a species until we drag ourselves out of this swamp of violence."
"None of these authors have advocated violence. But their warnings of impending Islamic takeover – a concept that is widely dismissed as implausible in conventional scholarly and political circles – sometimes carry an urgency that might seem to invite angry responses."
"In 2008, Hindutva leader B.L. Sharma 'Prem' held a secret meeting with key members of a terrorist group responsible for a nationwide bombing campaign targeting Muslims. [...] Last week, Anders Behring Breivik, armed with assault weapons and an improvised explosive device fabricated from the chemicals he used to fertilize the farm that had made him a millionaire in his mid-20s, set out to put Norway on fire. Even though a spatial universe separated the blonde, blue-eyed Mr. Breivik from the saffron-clad neo-Sikh Mr. Sharma, their ideas rested on much the same intellectual firmament. In much media reportage, Mr. Breivik has been characterised as a deranged loner: a Muslim-hating Christian fanatic whose ideas and actions placed him outside of society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mr. Breivik's mode of praxis was, in fact, entirely consistent with the periodic acts of mass violence European fascists have carried out since World War II. More important, Mr. Breivik's ideas, like those of Mr. Sharma, were firmly rooted in mainstream discourse."
"For Mr. Breivik, 's central crime was to have de-masculinised European identity."
"Mr. Breivik, his writings suggest, would have been reluctant to describe himself as a fascist — a common feature of European discourse. [...] These ideas, it is important to note, were echoes of ideas in mainstream European neo-conservatism."
"Mr. Brevik's grievance, like Mr. Sharma's, was that these politicians were unwilling to act on their words — and that the people he claimed to love for cared too little to rebel."
"Besieged as India is by multiple fundamentalisms, in the throes of a social crisis that runs far deeper than in Europe, with institutions far weaker, it must reflect carefully on Mr. Brevik's story — or run real risks to its survival."
"Shoes won’t help you get white girls. White girls are disgusted by you, silly little Asian."
"Full Asian men are disgustingly ugly and white girls would never go for you. You’re just butthurt that you were born as an asian piece of shit, so you lash out by linking these fake pictures. You even admit that you wish you were half white. You’ll never be half-white and you’ll never fulfill your dream of marrying a white woman. I suggest you jump off a bridge."
"Men shouldn't have to look and act like big, animalistic beasts to get women. The fact that women still prioritize brute strength just shows that their minds haven't fully evolved."
"Women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If they were, they'd be all over me."
"Never insult the style of Elliot Rodger. I’m the most stylish person in the world. Just look at my profile pic. That’s just one of my fabulous outfits. The sweater I’m wearing in the picture is $500 from Neiman Marcus."
"If we can’t solve our problems we must DESTROY our problems... One day incels will realise their true strength and numbers and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system. Start envisioning a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU."
"The boys in my grade talked about sex a lot. Some of them even told me that they had sex with their girlfriends. This was the most devastating and traumatizing thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Boys having sex at my age of Fourteen? I couldn’t fathom it. How is it that they were able to have such intimate and pleasurable experiences with girls while I could only fantasize about it? I frequently started asking myself. This was an all-boys school… How in the hell were those boys even able to meet girls to have sex with? I wondered. I hoped they were lying. I hoped against all hope. [...] and one of my obnoxious classmates named Jesse was bragging about having sex with his girlfriend. I defiantly told him that I didn’t believe him, so he played a voice recording of what sounded like him and his girlfriend having sex. I could hear a girl saying his name over and over again while she panted franticly. He grinned at me smugly. I felt so inferior to him, and I hated him."
"I began to have fantasies of becoming very powerful and stopping everyone from having sex. I wanted to take their sex away from them, just like they took it away from me. I saw sex as an evil and barbaric act, all because I was unable to have it. This was the major turning point. My anger made me stronger inside. This was when I formed my ideas that sex should be outlawed. It is the only way to make the world a fair and just place. If I can’t have it, I will destroy it. That’s the conclusion I came to, right then and there."
"I spent more time studying the world, seeing the world for the horrible, unfair place it is. I then had the revelation that just because I was condemned to suffer a life of loneliness and rejection, doesn’t mean I am insignificant. I have an exceptionally high level of intelligence. I see the world differently than anyone else. Because of all of the injustices I went through and the worldview I developed because of them, I must be destined for greatness. I must be destined to change the world, to shape it into an image that suits me!"
"That [Lottery] ticket, of course, didn’t win. And neither would any of the tickets I buy after it, but they would give me hope."
""Maybe if I built muscles, girls will be attracted to me", I hopefully proclaimed to myself."
"What was seen can never be unseen, and I will never forget it, nor will I forgive it."
"He was my comrade in virginity, for he too didn’t get any attention from girls, and I’m sure he suffered from it, but not as much as I did. I was very perplexed as to why he didn’t feel any anger towards girls for denying him sex."
"But that was only a small part of the reason why I quit. The main reason was the disturbing new player-base. The game got bigger with every new expansion that was released, and as it got bigger, it brought in a vast amount of new players. I noticed that more and more “normal” people who had active and pleasurable social lives were starting to play the game, as the new changes catered to such a crowd. WoW no longer became a sanctuary where I could hide from the evils of the world, because the evils of the world had now followed me there. I saw people bragging online about their sexual experiences with girls... and they used the term “virgin” as an insult to people who were more immersed in the game than them. The insult stung, because it was true. Us virgins did tend to get more immersed in such things, because our real lives were lacking. I couldn’t stand to play WoW knowing that my enemies, the people I hate and envy so much for having sexual lives, were now playing the same game as me. There was no point anymore. I realized what a terrible mistake I made to turn my back on the world again. The world is brutal, and I need to fight for my place in it. My life was at a crucial turning point, and I couldn’t waste any more precious time."
"A few family friends complimented my appearance, and that made me feel a bit better about myself. It is so peculiar how a simple smile or a compliment can completely change how I feel about the world for a few moments."
"I excused myself as soon as I finished eating, and boy did I stuff myself on that meal. I then walked outside onto the beach. The wine had long since gone to my head, making me feel a sense of dizzy invigoration. I started walking along the shore, taking in the magnificence of the gentle, moonlit ocean. It was so... romantic. I kept walking and walking with no destination in mind. The romance of it all filled me with despair and longing. I wanted a girlfriend to experience that moment with me, but no girl wanted to be my girlfriend. The only thing I could do was imagine how heavenly it would be to have a beautiful girl by my side. It is such a shameful tragedy."
"I did, however, pass by one young girl, and she was like a goddess who came down from heaven. She was walking alone, in her bathing suit, with her luscious blonde hair blowing in the wind. I couldn’t help but slyly admire her beauty as we passed by each other. I was scared. I was scared that she might view me as nothing but an inferior insect who’s presence ruins her atmosphere. Her beauty was intoxicating! And then, just as we passed each other, she actually looked at me. She looked at me and smiled. Most girls never even deigned to look at me, and this one actually looked at me and smiled. I had never felt so euphoric in my life. One smile. One smile was all it took to brighten my entire day. The power that beautiful women have is unbelievable. They can temporarily turn a desperate boy’s whole world around just by smiling."
"How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more."
"In that college town, everyone went out with at least a little alcohol in their system. I wasn’t an alcoholic, but drinking alcohol always helped me with being more confident and sociable. On weekend nights, I took a few shots from my vodka bottle and set out on walks around the town, desperately hoping that I would stumble across some opportunity to make friends. I often ended up sitting alone at some café, hoping girls would talk to me before I sobered up. No girl ever did. I then went back home to lie in my bed alone."
"I eventually grew to hate him after I heard him having sex with my sister. I arrived at the house one day, my mother being at work, and heard the sounds of Samuel plunging his penis into my sister’s vagina through her closed room door, along with my sister’s moans. I stood there and listened to it all. So my sister, who was four years younger than me, managed to lose her virginity before I did."
"One time, as I was walking across the huge bridge that connected the two campuses, I passed by a girl I thought was pretty and said “Hi” as we neared each other. She kept on walking and didn’t even have the grace to respond to me. How dare she! That foul bitch. I felt so humiliated that I went to one of the school bathrooms, locked myself in a toilet stall, and cried for an hour."
"I spent the rest of the night pondering over what was in store for me at that point in life. I was no longer a teenager, and I’ll never be able to experience having sex as a teenager."
"On the second day, they started inviting their equally rowdy friends into my apartment, and we exchanged more small talk. To my indignant surprise, they asked me the question I always dreaded answering: “Are you a virgin?” I admitted that I was a virgin. I always admitted the truth about this. It was my life struggle, and I couldn’t lie about such a thing."
"It was that pathetic feeling of not having a hot girlfriend on my arm while some other boys in the theatre did. What I truly wanted... what I truly NEEDED, was a girlfriend. I needed a girl’s love. I needed to feel worthy as a male. For so long I have felt worthless, and it’s all girls’ fault. No girl wanted to be my girlfriend."
"A man having a beautiful girl by his side shows the world that he is worth something, because obviously that beautiful girl sees some sort of worth in him"
"As the phrase that I had coined goes: If I cannot join them, I will rise above them; and if I cannot rise above them, I will destroy them."
"I have always had a penchant for luxury, opulence, and prestige"
"The Spring of 2013 was also the time when I came across the website PUAHate.com. It is a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me ... though unlike me they would be too cowardly to act on it."
"In late June, my mother moved out of the Summit Town Homes and bought a house in West Hills. It was the first time my mother bought a house, as she had only rented in the past. The house had recently undergone a renovation, so it was practically brand new. The house had a swimming pool and was located in a nice enough area, though I would have still preferred it if my mother had gotten married to a wealthy man and moved into a mansion. I still continued to pester her to do this, and she still stubbornly refused. I will always resent my mother for refusing to do this. If not for her sake, she should have done it for mine. Joining a family of great wealth would have truly saved my life. I would have a high enough status to attract beautiful girlfriends and live above all of my enemies. All of my horrific troubles would have been eased instantly. It is very selfish of my mother to not consider this."
"I have lived such an unnatural life, devoid of love, sex, and pleasure."
"I had never been a violent person in nature, but after building up so much hatred over the years, I realized that I wouldn’t hesitate to kill or even torture my hated enemies if I was given the opportunity."
"I ordered my coffee and sat down on one of their chairs to relax. A few moments later, when I looked up from my drink, I saw a young couple standing in line. The two of them were kissing passionately. The boy looked like an obnoxious punk; he was tall and wore baggy pants. The girl was a pretty blonde! They looked like they were in the throes of passionate sexual attraction to each other, rubbing their bodies together and tongue kissing in front of everyone. I was absolutely livid with envious hatred. When they left the store I followed them to their car and splashed my coffee all over them."
"A tall, blonde, jock-type guy walked into one of the restaurants, and at his side was one of the sexiest girls I had ever seen... I followed them in my car for a few minutes, and when they entered a less inhabited area I opened my window and splashed my iced tea all over them."
"I walked into the range, rented a handgun from the ugly old redneck cashier, and started to practice shooting at paper targets. As I fired my first few rounds, I felt so sick to the stomach. I questioned my whole life, and I looked at the gun in front of me and asked myself “What am I doing here? How could things have led to this?” I couldn’t believe my life was actually turning out this way. There I was, practicing shooting with real guns because I had a plan to carry out a massacre. Why did things have to be this way, I silently questioned myself as I looked at the handgun I was holding in front of me. I paid my fee and left the range within minutes, feeling as if I was going to be sick. I spent the rest of the waiting period at the Coffee Bean in Oxnard, where I sat by myself feeling absolutely disgusted. My whole world was twisted."
"My first act of preparation was the purchase my first handgun. I did this quickly and hastily, at a local gun shop called Goleta Gun and Supply. I had already done some research on handguns, and I decided to purchase the Glock 34 semiautomatic pistol, an efficient and highly accurate weapon. I signed all of the papers and was told that my pickup day was in mid-December. That fell in nicely, because that was when I was planning on staying in Santa Barbara till. After I picked up the handgun, I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?"
"I concluded that women are flawed. There is something mentally wrong with the way their brains are wired, as if they haven’t evolved from animal-like thinking. They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses. That is why they are attracted to barbaric, wild, beast-like men. They are beasts themselves. Beasts should not be able to have any rights in a civilized society. If their wickedness is not contained, the whole of humanity will be held back from advancement to a more civilized state. Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilized men of intelligence. If women had the freedom to choose which men to mate with, like they do today, they would breed with stupid, degenerate men, which would only produce stupid, degenerate offspring. This in turn would hinder the advancement of humanity. Not only hinder it, but devolve humanity completely. Women are like a plague that must be quarantined. When I came to this brilliant, pefect revelation, I felt like everything was now clear to me, in a bitter, twisted way. I am one of the few people on this world who has the intelligence to see this. I am like a god, and my purpose is to exact ultimate Retribution on all of the impurities I see in the world."
"I came across this Asian guy who was talking to a white girl. The sight of that filled me with rage. I always felt as if white girls thought less of me because I was half-Asian, but then I see this white girl at the party talking to a full-blooded Asian. I never had that kind of attention from a white girl! And white girls are the only girls I’m attracted to, especially the blondes. How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them? I thought with rage. I glared at them for a bit, and then decided I had been insulted enough. I angrily walked toward them and bumped the Asian guy aside, trying to act cocky and arrogant to both the boy and the girl. My drunken state got the better of me, and I almost fell over to the floor after a few minutes of this. They said something along the lines that I was very drunk and that I needed to get some water, so I angrily left them and went out to the front yard, where the main partying happened. Rage fumed inside me as I realized that I just walked away from that confrontation, so I rushed back into the house and spitefully insulted the Asian before walking outside again."
"I needed two working handguns at the same time, as that was how I planned to commit suicide; with two simultaneous shots to the head."
"Coupled with my hate-fueled eagerness to carry out my act of revenge, there was also an extreme sense of fear inside me. Part of me still didn’t want to do it. It will mean my death, and I have always been afraid of death."
"How dare those girls give their love and sex to those other men and not me, I constantly think when I see young couples. There is nowhere in the world I can go anymore. There is no more life to live. The Day of Retribution is all I have. It is the final solution to all of the injustices of this twisted world. By doing this, I will set right all of the wrongs I’ve had to face in my sorry excuse of a life."
"I am not part of the human race. Humanity has rejected me. The females of the human species have never wanted to mate with me, so how could I possibly consider myself part of humanity? Humanity has never accepted me among them, and now I know why. I am more than human. I am superior to them all. I am Elliot Rodger... Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent... Divine! I am the closest thing there is to a living god. Humanity is a disgusting, depraved, and evil species. It is my purpose to punish them all. I will purify the world of everything that is wrong with it. On the Day of Retribution, I will truly be a powerful god, punishing everyone I deem to be impure and depraved."
"Alas, there was no way I could carry out my plans if I had a cold. Everything had to be perfect. In addition, I found out that father had arrived home two days earlier than he originally said he would, so if I had indeed went forth with my plans, I would have had to kill my father, which I wouldn’t be mentally prepared for."
"My initially happy interest in the game Warcraft 3 had an ominous tone to it. This was the beginning of a long relationship with the Warcraft franchise. In less than a year from that point, they would release their ultimate game, World of Warcraft, a game that I would find sanctuary in for most of my teenage years."
"[13 years old] After almost a month went by after getting World of Warcraft, I was finally able to play it. I made a WoW account with my father, and then I created my first character, a night elf druid. It really blew my mind. My first experience with WoW was like stepping into another world of excitement and adventure. It was a video game world, but they made it so realistic that it was like living another life, a more exciting life. My life was getting more and more depressing at that point, and WoW would fill in the void. It felt refreshing and relieving. I was only able to play it for a few hours for my first session. It was all I would think about when I wasn’t able to play it."
"It was too much for me to handle, and I stopped caring about my life and my future. I even stopped caring about what people thought of me. I hid myself away in the online World of Warcraft, a place where I felt comfortable and secure."
"Now that I was able to play World of Warcraft at my mother’s house with no limitations, aside from school and homework, I became very addicted to the game and my character in it. It was all I cared about."
"I withdrew further into the World of Warcraft, neglecting my homework and spending all of my free time playing it."
"While I was playing WoW after dinner at mother’s house once, I heard my sister watching the new show Avatar: The Last Airbender on the television. I decided to check it out. I soon found myself really enjoying it. It was a magnificent story set in a fantasy world where people can control the power of the elements. Once I watched the first episode, I was hooked on the story. Prince Zuko was my favorite character; he was a banished prince who was trying to regain his rightful place in the world. I always related to him. Avatar: The Last Airbender became my favorite T.V. show."
"These recent events cause me to withdraw even further away from the world. I drowned all of my misery in my online games. World of Warcraft was the only thing I had left to live for. My grades at Crespi dropped dramatically. I just didn’t care anymore. I hated that school. I didn’t think about my future. The only thing I gave any serious thought to was my WoW character. I had become very powerful in the game, and I was in one of the best guilds. With this guild, I participated in lots of five-hour raid events to collect better gear and armor for my character."
"I only had to be at school for three or four hours per day, and all of the work was very easy with teachers available to help me with anything. After those short school hours, I had all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted, and I spent it playing World of Warcraft... My only social interaction was with my online friends and with James, who would occasionally come over to my house to play WoW with me."
"I had heated conflicts with Soumaya during every week that I was at father’s house. All I wanted to do was play WoW, and Soumaya strictly limited my playtime. Because my new room was just across from hers, she knew what I was doing at every single second. She was breathing down my neck the whole time. She kept making me do chores around the house. I despised doing work around the house, especially since we had a nanny who was supposed to do it. If I made a scene about doing the work, she took away my laptop for a day or two. This was the most horrible thing she could do to me, to take away my only source of joy left in the world. She sometimes did it even when father was at home, and father didn’t lift a finger to stop her."
"Halo 3 came out in November. I got my mother to buy it for me on the very day it was released. I had a lot of fun playing it while drinking the special mountain dew flavor that was released with the game; Mountain Dew Game Fuel, it was called. The game definitely lived up to its expectations, and to my surprise I found myself playing it more than WoW for the first couple of weeks."
"Everything’s better with some wine in the belly, as a famous character from Game of Thrones would say."
"I arrived at the house one day, my mother being at work, and heard the sounds of Samuel plunging his penis into my sister’s vagina through her closed room door, along with my sister’s moans. I stood there and listened to it all. So my sister, who was four years younger than me, managed to lose her virginity before I did. It reminded me of how pathetic I was, that at the age of twenty-two, I was still a virgin."
"Everyone is focusing on Elliot’s lack of success with women, but they need to appreciate he was unable to communicate with anyone. He was so shy and painfully awkward. He had a boring personality and he didn’t talk... He would never dream of approaching a girl, he just expected them to come to him, which they didn’t. Even if any of them ever had, it wouldn’t have lasted long, because he wouldn’t chat to them... He was incredibly hard work to talk to and I would always make sure Addison was there when we met up. We really had nothing to talk about. He liked computer games and skateboarding when he was younger, but that was it."
"Elliot Rodger was trying to act out the role of a film star when he went on his killing spree – to make up for the fact he felt like a failure in real life. Clearly he did not feel he had the status he deserved. In his last YouTube video, which he explicitly filmed to leave a legacy, he casts himself as a movie star. In another of his clips he appears to reference the film American Psycho, and it might be that he has taken the main character, Patrick Bateman, as a role model. Bateman, played by Christian Bale, is a successful Wall Street banker who picks up women and then butchers them after sex. The irony is that Bale’s character is both sexually successful and a killer. But for Rodger, his sexual frustration was the driving force behind the anger. However, both share deep feelings of sexual desire for women and aggression towards them."
"I first met him when he was aged eight or nine and I could see then that there was something wrong with him. I'm not a psychologist, but looking back now he strikes me as someone who was broken from the moment of conception. It appeared to me that he had an overwhelming lack of confidence but not in a particularly endearing way. Sad, but not endearing. You were hoping that inside there was a normal kid wanting to come out - that he would overcome his shyness and bloom in some way. What became evident, only after reading the manifesto and watching that video, was that what he was actually hiding was this horribly twisted little monster."
"When you go to sleep normally you have a nightmare and you wake up and oh, everything is OK. No, I go to sleep, I might have a nice dream, and then I wake up and slowly the truth of what happened dawns on me. And that is that my son was a mass murderer."
"The autobiography the young man posted online that day is notable for its shallowness and its entitlement. Those are harsh words, but there’s no other way to describe his utter lack of empathy, imagination and engagement with the life of others. He’s often described as mentally ill, but he seems instead to be someone who was exceptionally susceptible to the madness of the society around him. His misogyny was our culture’s misogyny. His sad dream of becoming wealthy, admired and sexually successful was a banal, widely marketed dream. His preoccupation with brand-name products and status symbols was exactly what the advertising industry tries to inject into our minds. His fantasy of attaining power and status at the point of a gun is the fantasy sold to us by the gun lobby and the action movies in which some invulnerable superman unerringly shoots down the bad guys, a god made a god by his gun."
"The kid was crazy and crazy people do crazy things, there was the opportunity to stop it, he [Mr Rodger] is just another Hollywood bullshitter. He said he was going to do all these things for mental health and I don’t get a sense he’s doing a thing... Two days before his interview, his wife [Elliot’s stepmother Soumaya Akaaboune] was advertising not only that, but his pictures on Facebook. She said something like: "Peter’s going to be interviewed by Barbara Walters and, oh by the way, here’s a link if you want to check out his photography"... I don’t think he gives a s***. Unlike me, he’s probably glad to be rid of that kid. But I had a great kid, the best daughter you could imagine, I miss her every second. His kid was a pain in the ass that he shipped off to Santa Barbara to get him out of his life. He’s probably happy... He’s never sent me a letter of condolence, he’s never sent me a card, he’s never tried to reach out to me. He gave me the creeps the moment I saw him. What does it make you think of the stereotype of Hollywood? Peter Rodger has been on TV saying he was going to do this and that, but what’s he done?"
"When the hour of reality approaches, the zero hour, wholeheartedly welcome death for the sake of God. Always be remembering God. Either end your life while praying, seconds before the target, or make your last words: There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger."
"Everybody hates death, fears death, but only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death."
"Make sure that nobody is following you."
"Oh, God, open all doors for me. Oh God who answers prayers and answers those who ask you, I am asking you for your help. I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten my way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel. Oh God, you who open all doors, please open all doors for me, open all venues for me, open all avenues for me. God, I trust in you. God, I lay myself in your hands.... There is no God but God, I being a sinner. We are of God, and to God we return."
"We have some planes. Just stay quiet and we'll be ok. We are returning to the airport."
"Nobody move, everything will be ok. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet."
"Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves."
"So what if a kid dies? God will take care of him."
"Do you know the Boston Marathon explosion? I did it."
"These two mass murders were not the tip of the spear of a new invasion of al-Qaeda terrorists. These were two dysfunctional angry young men."
"Had about eight bullets in him and he was still fighting us... The only thing I had was my empty gun and I pistol-whipped him. I was trying to knock him out. I hit him as hard as I could, 10 or 12 times, couldn't knock him out... I only did it because I thought we were gonna die. I mean, truly, thought we were gonna die."
"He came charging up the street, shooting at me... So we're about six feet apart when he ran up that driveway, and he was shooting at me and I was exchanging gunfire with him... I'm lying there and I saw the front wheels go over Tamerlan. I saw him bounce up underneath the carriage a couple of times. I saw him get hung up in the rear wheels and get dragged 20, 25 feet... All we saw was taillights at that point."
"He put a shame; he put a shame on our family. The Tsarni family! He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity!"
"Kill all the Indians you come across."
"Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits [referring to infants] make lice!"
"As to Colonel Chivington, your committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct. Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity; holding the important position of commander of a military district, and therefore having the honor of the government to that extent in his keeping, he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the verist [sic] savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty. Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their in-apprehension and defenceless [sic] condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man. Whatever influence this may have had upon Colonel Chivington, the truth is that he surprised and murdered, in cold blood, the unsuspecting men, women, and children on Sand creek, who had every reason to believe they were under the protection of the United States authorities."
"I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me."
"Am I evil? I don't think I am. I'm no more evil than the black supremacist that killed 5 police officers in Dallas. You'll remember that Obama qualified/justified his actions in front of the ded's families directly afterwards."
"I would say that in this case the prosecution, along with anyone else who hates me, are the ones who have been misled."
"Throughout this whole trial you've heard a lot about hate and hatred, and how much hatred I’m filled with and how vast my hate was. Well I don't like what black people do. If I was really filled with how much hate I allegedly am, wouldn’t I just say yes? Why would I lie about that? It wouldn’t make any sense."
"I feel pity that I had to give up my life because of a situation that should never have existed."
"I have no friends even though I am cool."
"One of my only regrets is that I was never able to fall in love"
"It's odd about war crimes. We seem to have tried people only if they've lost the war."
"He just didn't understand it, the captain. Killing people in war's something new? Now what in the hell else is war than killing people? And destroying their homes and their farms and their way of life: that's war! And who in the hell is hurt besides civilians? I sat and I heard the captain talk and I could almost cry: I thought of the thousands of men, thousands of women, thousands of children, thousands of babies slaughtered in Vietnam, the bodies rotting away. The captain didn't seem to know about them. I did: I had been to Vietnam."
"We thought, We will go to Vietnam and be Audie Murphies. Kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst- kill. And get a big kill ratio in Vietnam. Get a big kill count. One thing at OCS was nobody said, "Now, there will be innocent civilians there." Oh sure, there will in Saigon. In the secure areas, the Vietnamese may be clapping the way the French in the '44 newsreels do, "Yay for America!" But we would be somewhere else: be in VC country. It was drummed into us, "Be sharp! Be on guard! As soon as you think these people won't kill you, ZAP! In combat you haven't friends! You have enemies!" Over and over at OCS we heard this, and I told myself, I'll act as if I'm never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in. As if everyone's bad."
"A village is the last damned place to RON: to remain overnight in. There would be Vietnamese all around us. Old mamasan might come with an AK-47 to show us whose hooch we were really in, with a VC battalion behind her."
"Everyone said eliminate them. I never met someone who didn't say it. A captain told me, "Goddamn it. I sit with my starlight scope, and I see VC at this village every night. I could go home if I could eliminate it." A colonel: he told me about a general's briefing where the general said, "By god, if you're chasing dead VC and you're chasing them to that village, do it! I'll answer for it! I'll answer for it!" The general was in a rage, saying, "Damn, and I'll lose my stars tomorrow if I tell those politicians who haven't been out of their bathtubs that." Americans would say, It's wrong, if American women fought in Vietnam, but the VC women will do it. And the VC kids: and everyone in our task force knew, We have to drop the bomb sometime. And still people ask me, "What do you have against women?" Damn, I have nothing. I think they're the greatest things since camels. And children: I've nothing against them. "Why did you kill them?" Well damn it! Why did I go to Vietnam? I didn't buy a plane ticket for it. A man in Hawaii gave it to me. "Why did you go? Why didn't you go to jail instead?" Oh, you dumb ass: if I knew it would turn out this way, I would have."
"We had a Plan, Medina was telling everyone now. And went to a Jeep: and taking a shovel out, he drew in the sand beneath him a map of our operation area. From left to right, this was Mylai Four, Mylai Five, Mylai ix, and Mylai One: or Pinkville, on the China sea. Pinkville now was the VC basecamp, Medina said, but we didn't want to get fired on from behind and we would start at Mylai Four. And continue on to Mylai Five, Mylai Six, and Mylai One. "We mustn't let anyone get behind us," Medina said, as I remember it. "Alpha and Bravo got messed up because they let the VC get behind them. And took heavy casualties and lost their momentum, and it was their downfall. Our job," Medina said, "is to go in rapidly and to neutralize everything. Kill everything." "Captain Medina? Do you mean women and children, too?" "I mean everything.""
"I know you'll say, "All right: if Medina said to kill everyone in Atlanta, would you?" And someday an Army officer may, the way this country is going now. I say this: if this were a hundred years ago, if I were a Union lieutenant and if Sherman told me, "Kill everyone in Atlanta," I guarantee I would have to. I once got a letter on Mylai saying, "My god! Why are the Yankees upset?" It said in the CIvil War, the Yankees were up against guerrillas, too. All the South's men, women, and children were out to defeat them. A very smart man in Missouri said, "If the Yankees come through here, do whatever you can. And poison the horses, and poison everyone's food. And invite the GIs-" I mean, "And invite the Yankees in, let them sleep with all your daughters, and if they're in the latrine for a pee: then shoot them. Let them believe you and kill them." The same as Vietnam: the people became guerrillas then. And used unconventional warfare: but the North wasn't about to sit in its trenches worrying, Gee, can I feed my horses here? It wasn't about to live afraid, and Sherman said if they wouldn't let the Army be, then there wouldn't be a Southerner left. He ordered his men to burn, to kill, and as soldiers say: to rape, pillage, and plunder the South. And there was no stopping him. The tactic worked. If you're a Yankee, you'll tell me, "Sherman's great," and you'll put a statue of Sherman in Central Park. As for me, I'd hate to see a monument to Calley's March to the Sea. But damn it! Sherman knew the solution to unconventional warfare."
"I don't wish to see anyone hurt: or anyone die for anyone else's sins. Not President Johnson or General Westmoreland or Captain Medina: I don't want to defame anyone to defend myself. I'm sorry about it: sometimes, my attorneys did to Medina what the prosecutor would do to me. "Now, wasn't the real villain in Mylai Captain Medina? And not that poor sweet lieutenant?" But the lieutenant wasn't all so sweet, and the captain was no more villain than any American from the President down. The guilt: as Medina said, we all as American citizens share it. I agree. I don't believe in goats, or pigeons, or patsies. I just don't believe they're in America's interest. For years, we Americans all have taken the easy way out. And been hypocritical fools. And gone around saying, "I'm nice. I'm sweet. I'm innocent." "You starved a thousand people today." "Who me?" "You threw away the scraps from the dinner table." "Aw-" "You killed a thousand people today." "Who me?" "You sent the Army to Mylai and-" "That wasn't me! That was Lieutenant Calley!" No, that isn't right for America. I say if there's guilt, we must suffer it. And learn. And change. And go on. For that is what guilt must be really for."
"In war, the dead people don't cry. The ones who are still alive do."
"Americans like to think that war is John Wayne. To get a grenade and a VC's throat, to shove the grenade right down it. Americans sit at television sets and say, "One hundred bodies. Boy!" And they think, Great, and they think that I'm the ugly one. I tell you, a hundred bodies still are a hundred people, and if they're dead their guts are just hanging out. And that's pretty horrible: I had once thought, Oh, war is hell. And then I saw war, and I could only sit and cry. And ask, Why did I do it? Why didn't I stand on a corner and say, "It's wrong." Why didn't I burn my draft card, and I wouldn't have had to go? I don't know."
"Can one credibly talk about fascism in the North American context as we approach the year 2000? Is it even remotely possible that the horrors of Nazi Germany could someday occur in Canada or the United States? When I talk about prefascist personalities, do I seriously propose that many North Americans could act like Hitler, Himmler, Hoess, and so on? [...] although the Nazis did monsterous things, it is a mistake to thing that only ardent fascists and psychopathic killers became Nazis. Adolf Eichmann struck some as a bland person, not particularly anti-Semitic, who basically wanted to advance his career and so worked hard to impress his superiors. His evil was "banal." I can also imagine that many of those who made the arrests and transported the victims to the death camps would have been described as "good, decent people" by their families and neighbors. So would many of those who ran the slave labor camps in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners perished and maybe even the SS soldiers who massacred whole villages. You can be an ordinary Joe, or Lieutenant Calley, and still do terrible things."
"The divergent views of Calley as a martyr by some and a murderer by others was reflective of a deeply divided U.S. citizenry, those for the war and those against it. Those who supported the war tended to see it as a means of stopping the spread of atheistic communism and protecting the people of South Vietnam from the oppression of a totalitarian government. Those who opposed it viewed it as variously a no-win war of attrition that was claiming the lives of tens of thousands of America's young men, an immoral war where hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians- ninety percent of whom were women and children- were being killed in bombing raids and through other means by military people from both sides wih callous disregard for the value of human life."
"The gap between those in the U.S. who were for the war and those against it widened as the Calley trial got underway in November of 1970. A hue and cry to "Free Calley" was heard from throngs of people from one side of the nation to the other, with the loudest voices coming from the Southern and Midwestern states. There were bumper stickers on countless cars and trucks, resolutions of support for the accused from half a dozen legislators, letters and telegrams by the boxful being received at the White House and at Calley's quarters at Ft. Benning, where he was under house arrest. A "Rally for Calley" was put on by the American Legion of Columbus, Georgia. A theme song that portrayed him as a martyr and scapegoat, titled "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley," could be heard on radio stations throughout the land."
"The widespread and highly emotional campaign to free Calley brought him a substantial degree of comfort, so much so that he was starting to think he had been acquitted. But a jury of his peers thought otherwise, and, in March of 1971, declared him guilty of murdering twenty-two "Oriental human beings" and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labor. The jury, by and large, regretted having to do it, but the evidence was overwhelming, the crime heinous. Calley seemed stunned. A large percentage of the American public was outraged, angry and loud in expressing disapproval of the verdict. Thompson felt that at least in thise one case justice was finally done, or so it seemed, for now. But President Richard Nixon- who had literally cringed over the idea that U.S. soldiers would be court-martialed in connection with war crimes in Vietnam- stepped in immediately as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to release Calley from the stockade, pending the approval of his conviction. Calley was placed under house arrest and allowed to live in his bachelor quarters at Ft. Benning. The announcement of the guilty verdict brouht on a convulsion of anger and protest among many U.S. citizens and a flood of emotionally charged letters and telegrams to President Nixon, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and other top-ranking government officials."
"After all was said and done, in the effort to court-martial those who were responsible for the murder of five hundred and four Vietnamese civilians, and the coverup which followed, only one man was found guilty of anything whatsoever in a court of law."
"Calley was convicted, Nixon had made it easy on him, five hundred and four people were dead in Vietnam, it was a war crime, no one paid for it."
"UK-based researcher Justin Brummer started studying songs of the Vietnam War while preparing his PhD. It soon became his main focus of interest, and today he has catalogued some 5,000 songs, including 91 that specifically reference the massacre. The vast majority of them deal with Lieutenant William Calley, the man who commanded the troops at My Lai and gave the order to kill civilians."
"Recalled to the United States over a year after the events took place, Calley was court-martialed beginning on November 10, 1970. Whatever horror the American public may have felt in learning about the killings, it didn’t initially extend to the man who ordered them. Calley’s conviction — the only one in connection with My Lai — caused a national uproar. President Richard Nixon received 5,000 telegrams on the subject, nearly all them in support of Calley. Meanwhile, a poll conducted by Louis Harris and Associates in April 1971 found that 77 percent of those surveyed thought Calley had been singled out as a scapegoat, and 65 percent disagreed with the conviction. That sentiment was clearly reflected in the music of the day. Brummer reports that from 1969 to 1973, pro-Calley songs outnumber anti-Calley songs 2-1. They justify his actions in a variety of ways: Calley was under attack, Calley was confused, and, perhaps most significantly, Calley was just following orders."
"Convicted for the premeditated murder of 22 civilians, Calley was initially sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end, he was saved from that fate by popular sentiment. Overwhelmed by the public’s demand to “free Calley,” President Nixon had him removed from the army stockade and placed under house arrest. His sentence was reduced twice; on November 9, 1974, less than three years after his conviction, Calley was released on parole. But the Lieutenant’s acclaim seemed to die as quickly as it came. Brummer hasn’t found a single pro-Calley song recorded after 1973; the post-war songs appear to be unanimous in their condemnation. In time, history found new heroes to tell stories about. And so you end up with songs about Hugh Thompson."
"Fifty years after the My Lai Massacre, Americans are still talking — and singing — about it. Back then, people praised the soldier who “followed orders” and condemned the soldier who listened to his own conscience. Today, they do the opposite. New songs shape old memories of an event that seems impossible to come to terms with. “People look back on it from a contemporary perspective and you get songs about a Hugh Thompson,” says Brummer. “They’re trying to correct it.”"
"It's hard to apologize for murdering so many people. But at least there's an acknowledgment of responsibility."
"We're a sick, sick, sick society If we don't set Lieutenant Calley free."
"William L Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname “Rusty:’ The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and- destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Gong stronghold known as “Pinkville.” Calley has formally been charged with six specifications of mass murder. Each specification cites a number of dead, adding up to the 109 total, and charges that Calley did “with premeditation murder… Oriental human beings, whose names and sex are unknown, by shooting them with a rifle.” The Army calls it murder; Calley, his counsel and others associated with the incident describe it as a case of carrying out orders... One man who took part in the mission with Calley said...We were told to just clear the area. It was a typical combat assault formation. We came in hot, with a cover of artillery in front of us, came down the line and destroyed the village. There are always some civilian casualties in a combat operation. He isn’t guilty of murder.”"
"The whole operation took about 30 minutes, Meadlo said. As for Calley, Meadlo told of an incident a few weeks before Pinkville. “We saw this woman walking across this rice paddy and Calley said, ‘Shoot her,’ so we did. When we got there the girl was alive, had this hole in her side. Calley tried to get someone to shoot her again; I don’t know if he did.” In addition, Calley and Medina had told the men before Pinkville, Meadlo said, “that if we ever shoot any civilians, we should go ahead and plant a hand grenade on them.” Meadlo is not sure, but he thinks the feel of death came quickly to the company once it got to Vietnam. “We were cautious at first, but as soon as the first man was killed, a new feeling came through the company...almost as if we all knew there was going to be a lot more killing.”"
"In November 1970, Lt. William Calley (a Florida native born in 1943) went on trial for his life. He was being court-martialed by the U.S. military for his participation in the My Lai Massacre and was accused of killing twenty-two civilians. Even though twenty-six officers participated and an estimated five hundred South Vietnamese were killed, Calley was the only man tried and convicted. The debate surrounding Calley’s actions intensified after politicians became involved. Georgia governor and future President Jimmy Carter instituted “American Fighting Man’s Day,” and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their headlights on in support of Calley. Alabama governor George Wallace visited Calley in the stockade and personally requested that President Nixon issue a pardon. Edgar Whitcomb, the governor of Indiana at the time, asked that all state flags be flown at half-staff for Calley."
"Musicians around the country also came to Calley’s aid and wrote songs in his defense. “Big Bill” Johnson wrote a song called Set Lt. Calley Free, which stated “We’re a sick, sick society, we’ve nailed Lt. Calley to a tree…We Americans are tired of a war that can’t be won, where a soldier is charged with murder if he uses his gun.” Another song by C Company, featuring Terry Nelson, titled The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley features lyrics like “I’ve seen my buddies ambushed…all the rules are broken…it’s hard to judge the enemy”. The artist also criticised the anti-war movement, claiming that those “marching in the street…were helping our defeat”. Nelson Truehart wrote a song called Morning in My Lai, which asked Americans not to judge Calley because “after all, he’s just fighting for you and me.” While most of the songs were country and performed by southerners, many songs of multiple genres went beyond defending Calley and portrayed him as a scapegoat. Even anti-war songs like Hang Lt. Calley and The Cry of My Lai were more critical of the government than they were Calley."
"The fact is that Calley had just been following orders. There had been increasing pressure from commanders for higher kill counts, and his exact orders when entering My Lai were to search and destroy. No American volunteered or was drafted for the purpose of killing civilians. In fact, when Calley and his men first arrived, they tried very hard to win over the South Vietnamese. As time went on, they noticed the locals were purposefully not helping them fight the Vietcong. Soldiers faced violence from men, women, and children of all ages during combat. The Vietcong were also heinously murdering captured soldiers. On one occasion, Calley recalled a soldier who had been captured, skinned alive, and bathed in a salt solution. The next day, they found the man’s skin ripped from his body and strung on a pole, with his penis having also been cut off."
"The time has come to reconsider Lt. William Calley. He may not have been a saint, but he was following orders and certainly was not the only man who killed civilians. While he does not deserve a monument, his actions are important because they raise questions about our military and government. Does the United States only involve itself in just wars? What are the real, long term consequences of Sherman’s march and the total war tactics of The “Civil” War? Will the United States ever stop fighting wars and rebuilding foreign countries? These are just a few major points that make Calley’s story important from a historic perspective."
"My name is William Calley, I'm a soldier of this land I've tried to do my duty and to gain the upper hand But they`ve made me out a villain they have stamped me with a brand As we go marching on"
"C Company featuring Terry Nelson, "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley" (1971), Plantation Records, written by Julian Wilson & James M. Smith"
"I'm just another soldier from the shores of U.S.A. Forgotten on a battle field a thousand miles away While life goes on as usual from New York to Santa Fe As we go marching on"
"With our sweat we took the bunkers, with our tears we took the plain With our blood we took the mountains and they gave it back again Still all of us are soldiers, we`re too busy to complain As we go marching on"
"When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun And the great commander asks me, 'Did you fight or did you run?' I'll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun And this is what I`ll say: Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could It`s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good Yet there`s not a man among us would not have understood"
"As it happened, the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam occurred at the time of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. It was difficult to miss the analogy between the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and My Lai, 1968. Alongside the front-page news and photographs of the Wounded Knee siege that was taking place in real time were features with photos of the scene of mutilation and death at My Lai. Lieutenant William "Rusty" Calley was then serving his twenty-year sentence under house arrest in luxurious officers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, near his hometown. Yet he remained a national hero who received hundreds of support letters weekly, who was lauded by some as a POW being held by the US military. One of Calley's most ardent defenders was Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia. In 1974, President Richard Nixon would pardon Calley."
"I'm going to go over and get them out of the bunker myself. If the squad opens up on them, shoot 'em."
"Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!"
"I hate it when people say teenage love is overrated.. guys who are virgins until they are older think 'we must think it's like some romantic move or some teenage romance movie'. I don't think of it like that."
"I'm not advocating this, but if I have to I might even try and use drugs to make up for it, maybe cocaine fuelled sex or something, maybe that can make up for that missed teenage experience."
"No, I never saw dead bodies."
"I escaped. I locked up my house. At some point I thought I would go back in a few weeks, and I never knew that it was for good. And, you know, I left everything -- especially my wedding dress that I wish I could have."
"Do you realize that we are the only people on the planet to see these things?"
"There are people who claim that I have taken from you everything. What I have taken I haven't taken for me, since I leave everything behind. But I will leave nothing behind, I will leave ashes, I will leave nothing to the bastards who have betrayed us. The harm they have done to the Rosy Cross, that I cannot forgive. What they have done to me doesn't matter, but the harm they have done to the Rosy Cross I won't forgive. I cannot."
"We are rejected by the whole world. First by the people, the people can no longer withstand us. And our Earth, fortunately she rejects us. How would we leave [otherwise]? We also reject this planet. We wait for the day we can leave... life for me is intolerable, intolerable, I can't go on. So think about the dynamic that will get us to go elsewhere."
"We don't know when they might close the trap on us… a few days? A few weeks? We are being followed and spied upon in our every move. All the cars are equipped with tracing and listening devices. All of their most sophisticated techniques are being used on us. While in our house, beware of surveillance cameras, lasers and infra-red. Our file is the hottest on the planet, the most important of the last ten years, if not the century. However that may be, as it turns out, the concentration of hate against us will give us enough energy to leave."
"Di Mambro: People have beaten us to the punch, you know."
"Space is curved, time comes to an end... Our cycle is over, these images tell all. [...] The good-hearted man can live in this precise second... a sublime event: the passage of the cycle of Adamic man towards a new cycle of evolution, programmed on another earth, an earth prepared to receive the stored vibrations enriched by the authentic servants of the Rosy Cross."
"I think the people who claim that Di Mambro was a conman are right. I think that the people who claimed that Di Mambro was convinced about his spiritual message are right too. Di Mambro was just a kind of complex personality, actually a kind of schizophrenic and disturbed personality. The major, the terrible consequence of it, is that it is a total loss of reality and the dream world he elaborated was shared with several people, who more and more entered into his delusions."
"In 1984 I met him, he was maybe one of the last conscious persons on earth. He moved with the forces, it was that simple. I don't like to use the word 'power'."
"[Di Mambro] explained to us that one day we'd all be called to a meeting at which a transit would be accomplished. It had to do with a mission, with a departure towards Jupiter.... He said to his listeners that they had to be on call twenty-four hours a day so as not to miss the departure and that once the order was given, we would have to move quickly."
"Akhnaton, of course, was Di Mambro. Di Mambro was Akhnaton, Moses, Cagliostro, Osiris. He used to say, "You understand, in all my incarnations I always had to fight, because my spiritual development was always so far in advance of the time when I was living.""
"But interestingly, for the members of the group, the real charismatic personality was Jo DiMambro. Now when I look at the video recordings of Jo DiMambro's lectures, it is just disastrous. He wasn't an eloquent speaker. But when I spoke with former members, and I told them that, they were just incredulous. Jo DiMambro, they would say, he was brilliant, he was extraordinary, and so on, because those people invested him with the qualities of a cosmic master."
"DiMambro had created a kind of virtual reality around himself. He only saw people who accepted everything he demanded. He didn't very much like people contradicting him. He was also trying to cultivate relationships with some other occult orders around the world. He was developing a fantasy world, and suddenly people in the core group put that into question --suggesting that actually this world he had created around himself doesn't exist."
"[Di Mambro] could have reached the end of his rope. He could be at the end in terms of health. He could be at the end in financial terms. He could be harassed by people who want money. He could be at the end on the level of the sect— there was a loss of members, loss of support, abandonment by his close relatives."
"Joseph courant à perdre haleine à mes côtés, avant qu'un obus nous fracasse, c'est le souvenir le plus fort qu'il me reste de lui. Un garçon qui a peur."
"My notion of God is that He is the essence of what makes all things happen."
"We are in the reign of fire, everything is being burned."
"There were some transcendent experiences in my life, some experiences that made me directly experience a superior aspect of man—to which I had previously been blind [...]"
"Our brains will undergo modifications, physical in the second phase, but certainly subtle and vibratory at first, which will cause man (the ones who are able) to react completely, and in a different way to events."
"If we do not consider tradition in light of scientific facts, it is useless; nothing can be learned from it. By the same token, if science does not incorporate tradition into its facts, it too is useless."
"in all great civilizations we notice that doctors were always priests and vice-versa. I am convinced that a doctor who is not concerned with reintegrating himself into a dimension in which the spiritual is more important than the physical cannot understand his patient as such. And this is rather the tragedy of medicine today, not to denigrate its authentic value concerning what it has allowed as far as transformation of man, but it nevertheless still leads to a dead end because it refuses to integrate the spiritual man into the physical man, even though the spiritual has conditioned the physical."
"We are not here tonight by chance. Every one of you is in this hall because he has a reason, he or she has a reason, to be here."
"Quand je vois la violence qui se déchaîne autour de moi, de nous. Je parle de Jo et de moi par exemple, parce qu'on n'accepte pas qu'on fasse partie d'une figure bien précise de la fin des temps. [...] Mon Dieu, quel cirque. Ça devient terrible. On vit une fin de fous, de fous... [...] Si tu savais ce qu'il faut jouer pour tenir la machine, tu n'as aucune idée. Enfin, bref, on arrive au bout. [...] Quelle planète, mon Dieu, qu'est-ce qu'on a foutu de descendre sur cette merde. Quelle planète, mon Dieu, qu'est-ce qu'on a foutu de descendre sur cette merde."
"L'homme n'a aucune raison d'être. Que nous mourions tous maintenant, le soleil ne s'arrêtera pas de briller."
"Liberation is not where human beings think it is. Death can represent an essential stage of life."
"Quel avenir pour nos enfants ? Au fond, c'est une question qui nous intéresse tous. C'est vrai que partout, des voix s'élèvent dénonçant la pollution. Qui dénoncent la disparité des richesses, qui dénoncent la guerre. Des voix s'élèvent partout pour essayer de protéger ce qui est encore à protéger, mais pourtant. Les décisions qui sont prises pendant les rassemblements internationaux sont extrêmement lentes. Trop lentes, pour ce qui pourrait apparaitre comme potentiellement la survie de l'humanité. Donc nous sommes, nous les hommes d'aujourd'hui, confronté avec la nécessité de repenser notre existence. Il est urgent de le faire, car ce qui disparait ne disparait que physiquement mais engendre le début d'un nouveau cycle ; une nouvelle existence."
"In the interior of the physical body there blooms a vital force, a vital energy which was there before Man's physical appearance on earth."
"You are not sick because you have a disease; you have a disease because you are sick."
"If you make the first steps, I'll make sure that you make the other ones."
"You start listening and by God, you know, you just all of a sudden feel so attracted to what he is saying. You talk about the universe, you talk about how man is made of four ingredients and how the stars are made of these same four ingredients. Then you go back to Egypt and Egyptology, and then somewhere along the line comes the possibility of extraterrestrials. And it goes on and it goes on like that. But the more you hear, the less you understand, and therefore, the more you want to know. You slowly get caught up in the web."
"[...] the real problem was that Luc Jouret and Jo DiMambro were people who couldn't very easily tolerate any kind of criticism or opposition. I remember a small but significant personal experience with Luc Jouret in December 1987. [...] We spoke for about 3 hours and at some point I mentioned two lines about him that had been published in an anti-cult booklet in France. It was really nothing of consequence. It wasn't even associated with the group he belonged to at that time, but to another group to which he had belonged before. When I mentioned that book, he told me, "Oh yes, Mr. Mayer, really that's something which I didn't like at all." He explained to me that he had tried to call the author in order to get a correction, and the author refused to speak with him. He called the author a second time. The author refused again. He called the author a third time. The author turned him down, and he told me, "you know, Mr. Mayer, one week later he was dead." This kind of remark is quite enlightening about the real allergy to opposition which such a man could have developed. I took it, of course, as a hidden warning to me. It seems I was the only person investigating the group to any extent. I hasten to say that it is not very clever, because usually if people warn me this way it makes me only more curious."
"Il disait que son père avait été inutilement sévère, qu'il ne lui avait laissé aucune liberté. Pour cette raison, il se montrait partisan d'une éducation très ouverte, sans contraintes, pour que les gamins s'épanouissent. C'est pour ça, me confiait-il, qu'il aimait par-dessus tout la liberté. Il pensait à la sienne, bien sûr."
"For outsiders, Luc Jouret was definitely a charismatic, charming personality. He was a very, very impressive person, especially in his interaction with with an audience. I did some research on the group in 1987, and at that time I attended lectures given by Luc Jouret for hours in front of several hundred people."
"I remember the very first lecture, already mentioned, which I attended with Luc Jouret. That was March of 1997 in Lausanne. Luc Jouret was lecturing on the topic "Love and Biology." On the advertisement it simply said: "Luc Jouret, Physician. Love and Biology." Nothing apocalyptic in the title. But after 10 or 20 minutes, he was already delivering a spiritual message with a strong apocalyptic content, telling the audience that volcanoes are about to erupt, forests are dying, this earth can no more endure these atrocities generated by mankind, and so on. This was a typical tone in his lectures."
"Jouret's act forces us to recognize the religious motifs that lurk beneath even the most materialist assessments of the unraveling environment, as if all the secular tools of activist science and politics cannot help us dodge the West's great cataclysmic story. Just as some tribal societies ritually enact the birth of the cosmos, Jouret performed civilization's end, magically expressing the ideology of those ecologists who get so deep they start lobbying for the voluntary extinction of the human race."
"For the first time I stopped and thought, "What am I living for? What must I do to overcome this sense of emptiness?" This is a feeling which we all experience from time to time, only not as intensely. In a situation like that some people will change jobs, and some people just disappear. However, I set off in a completely different direction. The desire to seek after the ultimate awoke within me, and I began groping for an answer. That meant that I had to discard everything. Yes, everything that I had. It took great courage and faith, and great resolution."
"First of all, a red-hot energy is released from the mūlādhāra chakra in the coccyx and travels up along the backbone, entering the sahasrāra chakra at the top of the head. After that, kundalinī travels up through the sushumna channel, which connects the perineum with the sahasrāra chakra. Then kundalinī passes through the sādhisthāna chakra (genitals) to the manipūra chakra (navel), on to the anāhata chakra (chest) and then through the vishuddha chakra (throat), and a spiritual awakening occurs."
"In my previous existence, I myself have killed someone at my guru's order. When your guru orders you to take someone's life, it's an indication that that person's time is already up. In other words, you are killing that person exactly at the right time and thereby letting that person have his poa."
"Let me tell you straight, those who think that this world is full of pleasure are not suited for our practice. For their lives have not yet come to the dead end that provides the impetus for spiritual practice. Only after experiencing suffering are they ready to start practice. [...] when you come to the end of this process, when you run into that dead end, that's when you begin to experience suffering. That's when you become keenly aware of the suffering of being reborn into this world, the meaningless of it all. It is because your true self has accumulated many experiences that finally you become aware of this."
"Once you've achieved satori then you realize what you need to do now, or just what this thing called life is. Then you lose all interest in money. After all, you've realized that there is something much more important than that. How can I live each day to the full? How can I live in such a way as to seek after absolute freedom, absolute happiness and joy, which is what the true self really desires? Gradually you begin to focus on these points. Then you begin training and head towards gedatsu."
"You can love all people. The ability to see all things as they are immediately brings one happiness."
"We have to prevent those of false gedatsu from wielding any influence over people. For that reason I think I will have to show you eventually the true state and power of one who has attained gedatsu, as a kind of touchstone."
"It is not wrong to presume that people today would obtain their rebirth in hell, or the realms of preta or animal, is it? The reason why is that they kill living beings, steal other people's belongings, pursue obscenities, lie, and drink alcohol. It is better to think that there is no means to redeem them anymore."
"It will be possible to limit the destruction if Aum works to produce large numbers of people who have reached gedatsu. The number of those who die at Armageddon will then be no more than a quarter of the world's population.... At present, though, my plan for salvation is behind schedule and the percentage of those who will survive is getting lower and lower. It is already impossible to limit the victims to less than one-fourth."
"The end justifies the means. Let's say there's a man whose vices are so many that he is certain to go to hell when he dies. If an enlightened individual determines that it's best to put an end to his life sooner and actually goes ahead and kills him, this act would be seen as plain murder in society in general. But in the light of our doctrine, the killing amounts to letting the man have his poa. As such, any enlightened person will see at once that both the killer and the person to be killed are going to benefit from the act."
"Since then I have continually increased the severity of my practice and have been able to investigate thoroughly the final stage of yoga. This is nothing else than the goal that I have set for myself. When I reached that stage, however, I realized that there are still more stages beyond, and I could not be satisfied. And so I began searching again."
"You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake..."
"Let us look at the situation of Aum Shinrikyo now. When did the slaying happen to Aum? It began when Aum got involved in the election and declared freedom, equality, and benevolence for every being, especially for the Japanese, spreading the hospice movement and campaigning against the consumption tax at the same time. Since then, just like a Lamb who was slain, Aum has sacrificed its honor and position in society for the sake of its teaching."
"Suppose there was someone who would accumulate bad karma and go to hell if allowed to live. And suppose an enlightened individual thought that it was better to terminate the person's life and gave the person poa ... Objectively speaking, it is a destruction of life.... However, based on the notion of Vajrayana, it is no other than respectable poa."
"... to dedicate one's bodily existence... For example, oppression from the government would be directed toward the supreme truth. Can you throw your body away? You might discard your own body. You throw it away without hesitation. This is the way of Tantra to dedicate one's body... It is the way of Tantra to abandon oneself for the sake of spiritual maturity."
"This is poa, understand? Do meditation. Repeat the phrase 'It was nice to be blessed by the guru, Shiva and those who have attained the Supreme Truth,' ten thousand times."
"It is time for you to carry out the plan of salvation. Let us prepare to meet our death without any regrets."
"I’m full of hate and I love it!"