Word: zealots
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...regard Abdullah as a dedicated, in-touch ruler. Each day he rises around noon, greets visiting dignitaries, emissaries and ordinary citizens until his 7 p.m. lunch, naps until midnight and then puts in another day's work at the office until dawn prayers. Though devout, if he's a zealot about anything it's TV news: his office has a bank of 33 television sets so he can monitor all available satellite channels at once. In contrast to more remote royals, Abdullah has become a populist prince, touring the country and even munching burgers in fast-food restaurants. Says Wyche...
...second job with a computer-software firm. In 1999, at the age of 25, he was married, had a young son and was earning a good living. "Nothing in his life, family background or activities indicated Cherifi was harboring the anger, fanaticism and conspiratorial drive of an Islamist zealot," the French official says. "Yet when he finally came to our attention, we realized he'd completely dedicated himself to international jihad...
...been brainwashed. What other reason could there possibly be for a man to take up arms for the Taliban? “Brainwashed” is a tricky word, and in this case an Orwellian semantic ploy to rename aggressors as victims. By their sort of logic, every Islamic zealot captured in Afghanistan is a victim of brainwashing. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government doesn’t seem inclined to accept an insanity defense for al-Qaeda fanatics...
...visits the Michigan Militia, Republican political rallies, an abortion clinic and the execution of Texas’s prettiest psychopath, Karla Faye Tucker. He is typically Canadian in his incredulity at the American right wing, particularly at its overt courtship of fundamentalist Christians. He mocks the diminutive Christian zealot Gary Bauer, who ran for president in 2000. Executions are rejected as illogical and bloodthirsty; the militia leader is simply psychotic. And he points out a few nonpolitical neuroses: the American compulsion, for example, to eat fatty foods, grow monstrously obese and lust after material goods...
...West had developed a fairly well-defined profile of the typical suicidal terrorist. That man would be young, 18 to 24, born in poverty, a victim of some personal tragedy, a despairing zealot with nothing to lose. He would be fanatic in behavior and belief: stern, moralistic, teetotaling. The status of shahid, or holy martyr, would solve his earthly issues in paradise, and someone would give money to his family on earth. If he hailed from the rebel training camps of Afghanistan, where the cult of jihad gets its earthly gunmen, he would be fundamentalist in his faith, ignorant...