Osama bin Ladenâs Evil Legacy

Osama bin Laden/Zawahiri of Al Qaeda and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of ISIS are dead.

Peter Bergen : Why do many young Arabs , Muslims , and even Americans continue to become entranced with bin Laden's Pied Piper music of radical fascist fundamentalist Muslim Jihad ? Bergen says it is important to try to understand the chilling social-psychological fit between the religiously saturated but distorted charismatic leadership of a man like bin Laden and the group psychology of communities where he and his colleagues and mentors recruit.

The group death or martyr scenario gives the terror-cult group a special, exciting, and dramatically triumphant defining martyr myth.

It becomes a source of “underdog” heroism, and paradoxical group cohesion and identity.

For bin Laden , the motivating apocalyptic scenario was his assertion that all Muslims in the world are being threatened by the West , particularly by Americans and Jews .