My Wife is doing double-duty at her hospital due to this free health check program which runs for 10 days this month for pulling in new patients thereby increasing the in-house bed occupancy which is part of the hospital’s KRA. Cheap, Crap, and whatever you can name about this program. There’s another hospital which advertises about sending its practioners to home and that’s crap too. The medical industry has to have its own uber-attitude and should not pitch down on pitiful marketing initatives.
Anyways the house is now super-quiet and I have been bored to death. All the time she is at home, I keep cribbing about the non-stop chatter, and the all-too frequent interruptions, but gosh! the house feels so empty when she is away.
Anyway, this weekend I decided to at least take some advantage of the situation, and watch some TV…something I am doing after months. Boy, I didn’t realize it’s so difficult to get hold of quality programming. All I seemed to get were reality/music shows. Finally though, landed on Discovery where they had just started this awesome documentary – Jihad – The Men and Ideas behind Al Qaeda. Pretty engrossing stuff. They go into the childhood and early lives of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri, how their ideologies and thoughts, and the political and military turmoil of that region eventually gave birth to Al Qaeda.
Pretty in-depth, and non-biased reporting, and tons of first-hand accounts with people who knew them and who had been/still are part of their Jihadist movement make this program a must-watch. I think this show lasted 2 hours? (maybe more), but it is totally gripping and a fascinating peek into a world and a way of living that is so different from what we know.
I can’t say though that this program answered all my questions. I watched it hoping to understand bin Laden’s beliefs and world-view a little more, but I didn’t really get that. He remained as enigmatic and undecipherable as before.
The section on Al-Zawahiri was extremely illuminating though. His background – as a boy he was highly influenced by Muslim Brotherhood thought leaders who wanted an Islamist Egyptian government that followed the law of God. His path to terrorism seems to have started when one of the people he looked up to were thrown into prison and brutally tortured and killed. His later experiences in an Egyptian prison seem to have further hardened him and set him on this destructive path.
Makes me wonder how many juvenile terrorists, our prisons, unfair criminal system, and brutal torture methods are breeding now?
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