Bin Laden framed modern grievances within a thousand-year humiliation narrative
Evidence
In the 1980s, Osama bin Laden’s goals were allegedly political. He wanted to dislodge Russian troops from Afghanistan and subsequently to evict American troops from Muhammad’s “holy land” of Saudi Arabia. However, in 1998, bin Laden joined radical Islamic clerics declaring jihad against America, in part to avenge humiliating affronts to Islam dating back to the Crusades in the eleventh century and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1918: — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 518