4/11/1996

“On April 11, 1996, when [future 9/11 hijacker Mohammed] Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque [in Hamburg, Germany]. It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response. …The will states: ‘No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.’ The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.”

 – Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Page 347