By Chuck Pfarrer
The depth of this book caught me completely off guard. I expected a riveting, but somewhat shallow, description of the Seal operation that took down Osama couched in a lot of US rah rah. Instead, this book is a detailed, deep and thought provoking look at SEALS, the history of the middle east, the life and persona of Osama and, of course, the operation that took down Osama. With great skill, Pfarrer
"It's been said that SEAL training is not so much a battle of wills, but a struggle against oneself. No amount of physical conditioning is enough to prepare a student to meet the challenge. Students are made to come to grips with misery. The test is always against oneself." Pg. 26
"On the nights of September 16, 17 and 19, 1982, Christian militiamen killed more than two thousand Palestinian men, women, and children in an orgy of destruction. The Israelis watched the murderers come, and then they watched them go. Israeli artillery units fired flares over the camps so the murderers could set about their work. It was one of the most cold blooded massacres in human history." Pg 89
"America turned a blind eye, but the Arab world was shocked and disgusted. The images of Sabra and Shatila did more to fuel anti-Israeli and anti-American feelings than any other event in the twentieth century. yet it hardly blipped in Western media. . . Tens of thousands of Arab men, those who considered themselves religious and those who were purely secular, vowed revenge for the innocents killed at Sabra and Shatila.
One of those men was Osama bin Laden." Pg 89 - 90
"The views of Osama and his ilk are not those of the world's Muslims. They are the beliefs of a handful of twisted psychopaths who have had to claw out a justification for murder by distorting the Koran." Pg. 96
"Osama bin Laden was not born to be a monster. He was raised in an affluent and moderately religious Saudi family. He was a soft-spoken, retiring, impressionable boy who lost his father at a tender age. Like thousands of other Muslims who became extremists, Osama bin laden came under the influence of men who were ruthless, brutal and amoral. The only difference between Osama and a teenage body bomber in Palestine is that Osama bin Laden had money - lots of it. And because he had money, he was sought out by men with extremist views. Hate requires capital to manifest itself in violence." Pg 96 - 97
"Azzam had the jihadi credentials and Osama had the cash." Pg 105
"Radicalism can only take root in the absence of hope. The Nazis rose to power in the poisonous environ forced upon the German people by military defeat and economic crisis. In a like manner, the Global Slafist Jihad was a siren call to a generation of Muslim men who felt thwarted and embittered." Pg. 107
"To perpetuate the myth of 'no WBD in Iraq' the media and the US government has had to scrupulously ignore facts on the ground, the testimony of victims, half a dozen United Nations reports, and medical journal articles discussing the treatment of soldiers exposed to nerve gas. Clearly, big media in the United States wanted nothing to do with the issue. Presented with facts, it ignored them. The facts wouldn't go away. Confirmation of the chemical attacks would come from a very unlikely source: the US military itself. Enter Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks Papers." Page 148
"The WikiLeaks documents and the events of the past thirty-six months suggest first, Saddam did not destroy his chemical arsenal. And second, Al Qaeda is manufacturing its own chemical weapons using legacy materials from Iraq's stockpile as well as material produced in their own clandestine laboratories. Instead of preventing Weapons of Mass Destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq has accelerated the acquisition, manufacture, and use of chemical weapons by Al Qaeda." Pg. 142
"Courage, SEALs learn at BUD/S, is not the absence of fear. The absence of fear in combat is the result of insanity, or an extreme lack of situational awareness. SEALs learn not to ignore fear but to channel it." Page 176
"When a room is entered, SEALs go into a state like satori - a wide-awake Zen consciousness that allows them to perceive and react with a minimal space between for thought. It puts them instantly in the here and now - connected not only to the situation, but tapping into the thoughts and intentions of the enemy." Page 191
To read more about:
- Menachem Begin
- Ariel Sharon
- Sabra and Shatila
Recommended reading: The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright
Book 41
No comments:
Post a Comment