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Letters from a serial killer: Inside the Unabomber archive
You remember Ted don't you? He was the notorious "Unabomber" who went around terrorizing CEO's with bombs because he felt that technology was destroying the human race.
Here is his take on Islam.
“Like a lot of people, I’ve been wondering (and not only since Sept. 11) about the significance of militant Islam,” Kaczynski wrote to an unnamed professor in England. (Many of the names in the letters are blocked out.) “It’s a subject of which I have to admit, I’m ignorant.”
What was the operating theory of al-Qaida? What exactly did bin Laden want? Was bin Laden like Kaczynski in eschewing a world of modern technology, or was he just another politician?
“Osama bin Laden has been portrayed as an opponent of modernity,” Kaczynski wrote in December 2001. “If he were simply that, I might be inclined to support him, but my guess is that his motive is less an opposition to modernity than a desire to create an Islamic ‘great power’ that would be able to compete on equal terms with other great powers of the world. If that is true, then he is just another ruthless and power-hungry politician, and I have no use for him.”
In theory, Kaczynski could have posed his questions about Islamic extremism to the inmate who at one point lived in the cell next door to his: Ramzi Yousef, who had been convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and whose uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was considered a key architect of the 9/11 attacks. But Yousef, a onetime exercise buddy (along with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) of Kaczynski’s who had encouraged him to study Islam, was moved to a more secluded cell and placed under tighter prison restrictions after 9/11, limiting his interactions with other inmates.
Soon Kaczynski was reading the Quran to better understand Islamic culture and offering commentary of al-Qaida’s “apparently stupid strategy” to those who wrote him. “If al-Qaida’s goal is what al-Qaida pretends it is, namely the collapse of the U.S., or maybe of the West as a whole, their strategy seems inexplicably obtuse,” he wrote in a January 2002 letter. “They ought to have realized that proclaiming themselves to be enemies of America as such and engaging in indiscriminate mass slaughter of Americans, they could only earn the hatred of all Americans and unite Americans behind their own leaders.”
The terrorist group, the man known as the Unabomber argued, would have been “far more effective” if it had declared its friendship for the American people and waged war only on “the existing system” and “members of the American elite.” “That way al-Qaida might have won the sympathy of some Americans (especially those who are themselves alienated from the existing system here),” he wrote. “This is the old strategy of divide and conquer.”
One killer coolly assessing the tactics of another, dissecting them with the rationality that has always been one of his defining characteristics. Kaczynski in his letters gives us a chilling glimpse into the two halves of his personality: the evil and the brilliance, bound inextricably together.
You remember Ted don't you? He was the notorious "Unabomber" who went around terrorizing CEO's with bombs because he felt that technology was destroying the human race.
Here is his take on Islam.
“Like a lot of people, I’ve been wondering (and not only since Sept. 11) about the significance of militant Islam,” Kaczynski wrote to an unnamed professor in England. (Many of the names in the letters are blocked out.) “It’s a subject of which I have to admit, I’m ignorant.”
What was the operating theory of al-Qaida? What exactly did bin Laden want? Was bin Laden like Kaczynski in eschewing a world of modern technology, or was he just another politician?
“Osama bin Laden has been portrayed as an opponent of modernity,” Kaczynski wrote in December 2001. “If he were simply that, I might be inclined to support him, but my guess is that his motive is less an opposition to modernity than a desire to create an Islamic ‘great power’ that would be able to compete on equal terms with other great powers of the world. If that is true, then he is just another ruthless and power-hungry politician, and I have no use for him.”
In theory, Kaczynski could have posed his questions about Islamic extremism to the inmate who at one point lived in the cell next door to his: Ramzi Yousef, who had been convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and whose uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was considered a key architect of the 9/11 attacks. But Yousef, a onetime exercise buddy (along with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) of Kaczynski’s who had encouraged him to study Islam, was moved to a more secluded cell and placed under tighter prison restrictions after 9/11, limiting his interactions with other inmates.
Soon Kaczynski was reading the Quran to better understand Islamic culture and offering commentary of al-Qaida’s “apparently stupid strategy” to those who wrote him. “If al-Qaida’s goal is what al-Qaida pretends it is, namely the collapse of the U.S., or maybe of the West as a whole, their strategy seems inexplicably obtuse,” he wrote in a January 2002 letter. “They ought to have realized that proclaiming themselves to be enemies of America as such and engaging in indiscriminate mass slaughter of Americans, they could only earn the hatred of all Americans and unite Americans behind their own leaders.”
The terrorist group, the man known as the Unabomber argued, would have been “far more effective” if it had declared its friendship for the American people and waged war only on “the existing system” and “members of the American elite.” “That way al-Qaida might have won the sympathy of some Americans (especially those who are themselves alienated from the existing system here),” he wrote. “This is the old strategy of divide and conquer.”
One killer coolly assessing the tactics of another, dissecting them with the rationality that has always been one of his defining characteristics. Kaczynski in his letters gives us a chilling glimpse into the two halves of his personality: the evil and the brilliance, bound inextricably together.