From Osama's latest tape:
(note that I am not advocating anything less than killing the man; but we should at least find out why he wants to hurt us first)
Quote:
Praise be to Allah who created the creation for his worship and commanded them to be just and permitted the wronged one to retaliate against the oppressor in kind. To proceed:
Peace be upon he who follows the guidance: People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.
Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom.
I find it interesting, that last part. He directly states that he is fighting for his freedom and security.
Quote:No, we fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.
No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.
But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.
He says Bush isn't telling the truth; not about whether or not they
did do it(which is what matters from a legal and moral point of view), but about
why they did it.
Quote:The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
Now, here's my favorite:
Quote:At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.
So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretence of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn't forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region's presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.
All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
You may not think we're losing, but Bin Laden does. This emboldens him.
Osama Bin Laden never once says in this tape 'We hate the American People' or 'we want everyone in America to die' or 'we hate your freedoms.' He specifically says the OPPOSITE of that last one.
Why would he lie? What is the motivation for a man who ordered (and successfully, I might add) at least 3 major attacks against the US to lie?
By telling our people they hate and want to kill all of us, we legitimize him as a world power. We add to his cause. We have empowered our own enemies against us.
So; it is obvious that the terrorists believe that we have been harming their people in the middle east for some time, especially through our support of Israel. Whether that is true or not, let me ask you a question:
Is the best way to convince someone you don't want to harm them, to harm them?
By killing those who oppose us (the insurgents) we justify the religious leaders and terrorist leaders who are telling the people of the middle east that we are imperialists who very much DO want to harm them.
So, how do we fight terrorism? In two ways:
1. We force them to change.
2. We force ourselves to change.
#1. How many countries around the world harbor terrorism? 90, or something like that at last count?
Obviously we cannot invade them all.
Fortunately we don't need to; the vast majority of those countries are willing to cooperate with the international interest to track down and kill/arrest those terrorists.
So the question really is, 'How do we fight terrorism in countries who will not cooperate?'
And that is a very tough one to answer. If we cannot invade these countries every time this happens, there has to be a way to deal with this without invasion, which is massively harmful to the populace and ethos of the occupied people.
So yes, I do believe that an international police-type organization, with the cooperation of an international community backing them, can accomplish great tasks when it comes to finding terrorists and stopping terrorism. We use economic and other incentives to try to make countries cooperate before we invade them.
Here in the USA you won't find a lot of support for #2. People are proud; we don't want to change because someone else doesn't like our life, why should we, thank you very much!!!!!
But! If there is a chance that we are precipitating the violence in the middle east, logic demands that we examine that chance, find out if there is validity to it, and correct the problem. I'm sure I don't need to tell you the areas and ways in which we have affected their society in the last century or so, and I'm sure you can see for yourself ways that we could lessen that effect.
We are sluggish to change; people hate and fear change. But it is juvenille to expect that we can just go to the Middle East, kill Alllllll the bad guys, and then go home and live like we did before. That just isn't going to happen. We are not going to be able to kill all the bad guys without becoming very bad guys ourselves, and noone wants that, do they?
In Iraq, some say we've led to the deaths of over 100k people. Let's say that's too liberal a number, and call it 60k. That's 20 times the number of people who died in 9/11.
Many people say, 'You gotta break some eggs to make a cake' and 'Hey, we sure aren't killing as many as we could be.'
On 9/11, Bin Laden said to himself, 'You gotta break some eggs to make a cake' and 'Hey, we sure aren't killing as many as we could be.'
That's why war isn't the solution to terrorism; it's why we are going to have to adjust as a society to the reality of the Middle East; and it's why we should be working with the world to combat this threat, and not fragmenting it.
Thanks for asking
Cycloptichorn
