bin Laden Endorses Kerry

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Not to mention that in this context, when they say 'state,' they mean 'nation.'

According to whom? Not according to this:

Quote:

Osama Bin Laden Tape Threatens U.S. States Not to Vote for Bush[/i][/u]

November 1, 2004 No.14


By: Yigal Carmon*
The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera [1] on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to "each U.S. state," designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words "ay wilaya" (which means "each U.S. state") [2] to mean a "country" or "nation" other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

The Islamist website Al-Qal'a explained what this sentence meant: "This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, 'Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,' it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn't treat all American people as if they're the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections." [3]

Another interesting aspect of the speech is the fact that while bin Laden made his specific threat to each U.S. state, he also offered an election deal to the American voters, attempting to influence the election by these means rather than influencing it through terrorist attacks. [4] This peace offer is a theme that follows up on his April speech directed to Europe, in which he offered a truce. [5] The Islamist website Al-Islah explains: "Some people ask 'what's new in this tape?' [The answer is that] this tape is the second of its kind, after the previous tape of the Sheikh [Osama bin Laden], in which he offered a truce to the Europeans a few months ago, and it is a completion of this move, and it brings together the complementary elements of politics and religion, political savvy and force, the sword and justice. The Sheikh reminds the West in this tape of the great Islamic civilization and pure Islamic religion, and of Islamic justice" [6]

Another conspicuous aspect of the tape is the absence of common Islamist themes that are relevant to the month of Ramadan, which for fundamentalists like bin Laden is the month of Jihad and martyrdom. Noticeably absent from the Al-Jazeera tape was his usual appearance with a weapon, and more importantly the absence of references to Jihad, martyrdom, the Koran, the Hadith (Islamic tradition), Crusaders, Jews, and the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad on the duty to wage Jihad against the infidels. For the followers of the Al-Qa'ida ideology, this speech sends a regressive and defeatist message of surrender, as seen in the move from solely using Jihad warfare to a mixed strategy of threats combined with truce offers and election deals.

The following are the relevant excerpts from the speech; for the full excerpts visit the MEMRI TV Project at www.memritv.org : [7]




"Oh the American people, I address these words to you regarding the optimal manner of avoiding another Manhattan, and regarding the war, its causes, and its consequences. But before this, I say to you: Security is one of the important pillars of human life, and free men do not take their security lightly, contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom. Let him explain why we did not attack Sweden, for example. Clearly, those who hate freedom have no pride, unlike the 19 [suicide hijackers of 9/11], may Allah have mercy on them. We have been fighting you because we are free men who do not remain silent in the face of injustice. We want to restore our [Islamic] nation's freedom. Just as you violate our security, we violate yours.

"But I am amazed at you. Although we have entered the fourth year after the events of 9/11, Bush is still practicing distortion and deception against you and he is still concealing the true cause from you. Consequently, the motives for its reoccurrence still exist.

"We had no difficulty dealing with Bush and his administration, because it resembles the regimes in our [Arab] countries, half of which are ruled by the military, and the other half are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents with whom we have had a lot of experience. Among both types, there are many who are known for their conceit, arrogance, greed, and for taking money dishonestly.

"This resemblance began with the visit of Bush Sr. to the region. While some of our people were dazzled by the U.S. and hoped that these visits would influence our countries, it was he who was influenced by these monarchic and military regimes. He envied them for remaining in their positions for decades, while embezzling the nation's public funds with no supervision whatsoever. He bequeathed tyranny and the suppression of liberties to his son and they called it the Patriot Act, under the pretext of the war on terrorism.

"Bush Sr. liked the idea of appointing [his] sons as state governors. Similarly, he did not neglect to import into Florida the expertise in falsifying [elections] from the leaders of this region in order to benefit from it in difficult moments.

"We agreed with the general commander Muhammad Atta, may Allah have mercy on him, that all operations should be carried out within 20 minutes, before Bush and his administration would become aware. We never imagined that the Commander in Chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face this great horror alone when they needed him most. It seemed to him that a girl's story about her goat and its butting was more important than dealing with planes and their 'butting' into skyscrapers. This allowed us three times the amount of time needed for the operations, Allah be praised.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or Al-Qa'ida. Your security is in your own hands, and any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."


* Yigal Carmon is the President of MEMRI.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Al-Jazeera (Qatar), October 27, 2004.

[2] "Wilaya" refers specifically to a U.S. state; it would never refer to an independent country. The term for such a country is "Dawla."

[3] https://www.qal3ati.com/vb/showthread.php?t=115812

[4] To illustrate this principle, he uses Sweden as a model of a country that was never attacked by Al-Qa'ida.

[5] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 695, April 15, 2004, "Osama Bin Laden Speech Offers Peace Treaty with Europe, Says Al-Qa'ida 'Will Persist in Fighting' the U.S." http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP69504

[6] www.islahi.net/vboard/showthread.php?t=116432

I submit it is intellectually dishonest to assume bin Laden's tape was anything other than an attempt to influence the US Election to the disadvantage of The Incumbent.

Link, cannistershot?

CNN, though?

I'll go look.

Osama's Campaign Commercial
Does he hope his video will help Bush?

By Daniel Benjamin
Postednotedop-ed in the New York Times that noted, based on Internet material, the jihadists see themselves as being on a roll, especially in Iraq.

Experts on al-Qaida have also made the opposite point to Krauthammer's: The jihadists know that the United States is not going to capitulate in the war on terror, so the terrorists are better served by having a polarizing figure such as Bush in office. His actions such as the invasion of Iraq, the argument runs, have aided the jihadist movement, because they confirm its view that America is the ineluctable enemy of the Muslim world. The idea that by taunting Bush days before the election, Bin Laden would actually pump up his support appears widely accepted among foreign commentators, as a Google search of foreign stories on the videotape will show. Why is it inconceivable that the al-Qaida leadership couldn't also see it this way? They do, after all, study us closely. (As someone who has found his articles from scholarly journals analyzed on jihadist Web sites, I'm all too aware of this.)

The argument has the virtue of being consistent with other aspects of al-Qaida thinking. Fittingly for a group that seeks global revolution, al-Qaida has a Leninist streak: That is, they seek to maximize the tensions between the revolutionary force and the existing power structure. (Odd, isn't it, how Cold Warrior types like Krauthammer resist this notion, insisting instead on seeing the terrorists as "medieval primitives"? Both Abu al-Ala Maududi, founder of modern Islamism in South Asia, and Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian theorist who is a central inspiration for Bin Laden, were deeply influenced by Leninism.)

We know, for example, from a late December 2001 video message that Bin Laden anticipated and welcomed the U.S. retaliation against Afghanistan for the 9/11 attack, and he seems to have been delighted to hold this up as another example of American bloodthirst. It was a central part of his public relations campaign to win support among Muslims. Similarly, his message shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq practically crooned with pleasure about the prospect of a U.S. military deployment that would proving again his argument about America. This may seem bizarre, but Lenin was thrilled by the carnage Russia suffered in World War I and rightly saw it as weakening the Czarist regime. We commit a dangerous mistake if we refuse to recognize that the jihadists are capable of such strategizing.

The idea that Bin Laden is pursuing a plan of "heightening the contradictions" is backed up as well by recent material from a jihadist Web site. On the Al-Hesbah Islamic Insurgent Message Board this week, the "moderator," who goes by the name Muhtaseb Abu Musab, weighed in with his own opinion about the election:

Quote:

n my opinion, Al-Qaida is not aiming at getting Bush to lose the upcoming elections, as some might believe. Al-Qaida knows very well that Bush's policy in Iraq and Afghanistan serves the Jihad to a great extent. The increase in hostility towards the Americans by all of kinds of people, is terrifying the wise [reasonable] Americans, to the extent that many of their allies (the Philippines, Spain, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic) walked out on them after only one year of the war. What will be the case if the war lasts for years and years?!!

It is worth mentioning that the Mujahideen are prepared for a long lasting war, that could go on for decades, until the fall of America into the same trap that the Mujahideen had set for the Soviets in the past…

Daniel Benjamin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff. He is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror.

By putting his bloody fingerprints on the election, Bin Laden has positioned himself for some bold post-Nov. 2 propaganda. If John Kerry wins, the Saudi will surely claim credit for regime change in the United States, much as jihadists have gloated about the fall of the Spanish government after the Madrid train bombings in March. If George W. Bush is re-elected, Bin Laden will crow to the Muslim world that the electoral results confirm what he has been saying all along: The American people are determined to inflict harm on Muslims, occupy their lands, and destroy Islam. They've reaffirmed it, he will say, by re-electing the man who invaded Iraq.

... I have seen several analysts say that the intended audience wasn't Americans at all, but people in the Middle East, where there is a bit of a power vaccuum and where he is popular and where he hopes to step in and solidify some power. That he was purposely choosing a moment when he would get the maximum attention possible, and purposely striking a more statesmanlike tone, less religious fervor and rhetoric. ...

n my opinion, Al-Qaida is not aiming at getting Bush to lose the upcoming elections, as some might believe. Al-Qaida knows very well that Bush's policy in Iraq and Afghanistan serves the Jihad to a great extent. The increase in hostility towards the Americans by all of kinds of people, is terrifying the wise [reasonable] Americans, to the extent that many of their allies (the Philippines, Spain, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic) walked out on them after only one year of the war. What will be the case if the war lasts for years and years?!!

It is worth mentioning that the Mujahideen are prepared for a long lasting war, that could go on for decades, until the fall of America into the same trap that the Mujahideen had set for the Soviets in the past.