Bin Laden's New Tape

Discussion
1

Just read the new message that Bin Laden has come out with and I’ve got to say I basically agree with the whole lot?

I can’t remember all the other tapes too indepth but this one sounds like Bin Laden is not a homicidal maniac intent on destroying the western world unless it converts to radical Islam. Infact it even sounds like he’s offering a way out of this dark conflict with a few fair suggestions.

I don’t agree that Israel should be destroyed…they have a right to be (as do the Palestinians)…but at the same time he doesn’t really put that forward in this message as is usual…so as I said earlier…I kind of find myself thinking we should do what he suggests in this message and see what happens rather than carry on with the wars and supporting Israel in it’s occupation. Of course we won’t…but we can dream.

Below is the story and some of the transcript…what are your thoughts on it?

"Osama bin Laden has told Americans to rethink their policies, in a new message in which he links their support for Israel to the September 11 attacks in 2001, a US-based monitoring group said. Titled “Message to the American People,” the video – released on Sunday by the As-Sahab media production branch of Al-Qaeda – features a still image of bin Laden and an audio statement, said IntelCenter, based outside Washington.

It came two two days after the United States marked the eighth anniversary of the attacks by bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network in which hijacked airliners were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Bin Laden said that among “some other injustices,” US support to Israel motivated Al-Qaeda to launch the September 11 attacks, IntelCenter reported.

He also stated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were driven by the pro-Israeli lobby in the White House and corporate interests, and not by Islamic militants.

“If you think about your situation well, you will know that the White House is occupied by pressure groups,” he said, according to IntelCenter.

“Rather than fighting to liberate Iraq – as Bush claimed – it (the White House) should have been liberated.”

He was referring to former US president George W. Bush, who ordered the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime.

If Americans want to end their confrontation with Al-Qaeda, bin Laden continued, they must reconsider their attitude toward the Jewish state.

“Put the file of your alliance with Israelis on the discussion table,” he stated, according to IntelCenter’s translation of the address.

"Ask yourselves to determine your position: is your security, your blood, your children, your money, your jobs, your homes, your economy, and your reputation dearer to you than the security of the Israelis, their children and their economy?

“If you choose your security and cessation of war, and this is what the polls have shown, this requires you to work to punish those on your side who play with our security,” Bin Laden said.

“We are ready to respond to this choice on aforementioned sound and just bases.”

According to bin Laden, current US President Barack Obama is powerless and unwilling to change the course of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama’s retention of US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other individuals from the Bush administration is confirmation of the president’s weakness, the Al-Qaeda leader said.

“It will become clear to you in days that all you have changed in the White House are faces,” he is quoted by IntelCenter as saying.

“The bitter truth is that the neo-conservatives continue to cast their heavy shadows upon you.”

Bin Laden urged Americans to pressure the White House to cease the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and US support to Israel, rather than succumb to what he called “the ideological terrorism” exercised by neo-conservatives.

If the wars are not ended, “all we will do is to continue the war of attrition against you on all possible axes, like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed with grace from Allah the Almighty and became a memory of the past,” bin Laden said.

IntelCenter said bin Laden typically releases such a statement annually around September or October.

The last audiotape by the Al-Qaeda leader was released on June 3. In that missive he scorned Obama’s overture to the Islamic world and warned of decades of conflict ahead.

That audiotape aired on the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel less than an hour after Obama landed in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s home country, at the start of a Middle East tour.

Bin Laden has a 50-million-dollar bounty on his head and has been in hiding for the past eight years.

Intelligence officials, US military analysts and other experts have long believed he is hiding in either Pakistan or Afghanistan near the remote mountainous border between the two countries.

In March, an audio attributed to bin Laden accused some Arab leaders of being “complicit” with Israel and the West against Muslims and urged holy war to liberate the Palestinian territories.

The same month, he urged the overthrow of the Somali president."

2

amazing. not that he put out a new statement or said the things he said, because on EVERY friggen american news site, you see “Kanye West disrupts Taylor Swift at Video Music Awards” headlines everywhere. this is why I can’t stand American media.

thanks for posting toot. wouldn’t have known about this otherwise, and that’s very sad isn’t it?

3

thanks for posting toot.

No worries.

The thing that struck me about alot of what he said was that I kind of agreed we should do it. And I mean let’s face it…agreeing with Osama Bin Laden about something tends to make you sound and look like a strange individual.

I know ALOT of people won’t give a hoot what comes out of that man’s mouth, but in the end we’re going to have to compromise with these factions in order to put an end to us being targeted with massive attacks. What he suggests seems fair enough. Obviously I know it’s alot more complex etc etc…blah blah blah…

4

will have to go back and look at the first rather jarring images of the taliban destroying reliefs or sculptures shortly before 911? and i said out loud(on the day those reliefs were destroyed by the taliban:this is madness. this is obscene.how can you destroy something centuries old, with a conscience.

maybe smurf can look it up, because i am a retard on the net.
i give zero credence to bin laden. zero. you don’t destroy artwork because you feel like it, centuries later.

5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamyan#Dynamiting_and_destruction.2C_March_2001

6

Honestly, I think bin Laden’s a pretty smart guy and right on many points, and I have always felt that way. It’s also worth considering that his fundamentalist religious posturing is an act to get these idiots to do what he wants.

The bottom line is that Israel is a terrorist state. I don’t care who owns the “holy land”. I have always said leave them be and let these idiots kill each other. The creation of Israel is bogus to begin with. Yes the holocaust was terrible but did the gypsies get their own fucking arbitrary state drawn on a map? Please. There were plenty of countries Jews could have safely emigrated to. National self-determination is the root of many of the world’s problems. Didn’t the British learn that the first time around?

Jews have always been privileged based on the control and influence they wield in the international economy. There are certainly special interests and powerful Zionists lobbying in the White House and I agree Obama’s hands are tied in that respect.

Saddam Hussein was a good thing for Iraq in that he at least kept all these warring factions in check and was secular enough to make the Sunni Shiite nonsense a non-issue. Fuck humanitarianism. If these people needed barbarism to keep them in line, so be it. It’s better than a state of anarchy which will eventually become a terrorist state that, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, is actually a threat to the US.

If we going to be Captain America where the fuck are the troops that should be in Darfur? Nothing to exploit and no Zionist/oil/moneymaking/Bush Sr. agenda there, so we care fuck all about it.

And Special Ed, ancient artwork is your chief concern? What about, like, modern day human lives and the fucking world trade center? It’s funny how people pick and chose their battles…

As for 9/11, I see it sort of like a Pearl Harbor scenario in that it was a warning and an attempt to discourage the US from getting involved which backfired and caused us to intervene directly in a situation which only affected us peripherally at the time.

7

thanks rev_skarekroe . that was a pivotal moment in my adult life, where i felt utterly helpless. and confused. it was visceral.
harsh. like wtf is going on, that can’t be resolved.
well. i didn’t grow up there, but i have an opinion, qaushed by the taliban at this point.
thanks for the reference.
it really stirred images of nazi captures, book burnings. unacceptable in a civilized society.
only time in my life when i couldn’t get a handle on the impact of the people in charge.

8

fuck bin laden.

9

If the wars are not ended, “all we will do is to continue the war of attrition against you on all possible axes, like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed with grace from Allah the Almighty and became a memory of the past,” bin Laden said.

It’s words like this that indicate Bin Laden still is a craicpot. There’s no changing the man, or the cause. I am confident and glad that no power such the U.S. will ever consider Bin Laden anything more than a deranged terrorist. He and his bitches need to be removed from any possiblity of doing more harm THEN you fix the bigger problem by working to reduce the yearning and justification of those who seek to kill thousands of innocent people for a half baked cause drenched in fundamentalist religious bullshit. One such progress would be not to be as supportive to Israel, which is not going to happen anytime soon from the U.S. but hey a girl can dream. Until then, as slack has already pointed out, Fuck Bin Laden.

10

art is a way to express everything going on around you.
i was a punk rocker at sixteen, and that was a couple decades ago, and i know art history as well as world history.
voidhead. i’ve been around the block with ALL arts. so step back, and stop complaining that the people here(don’t/doesn’t)know anything about what’s happening now, and what will influence your life, and many others.
art, stupidly, is the last place to be funded, and the first to go.
my life mission is to keep the shitty/ brilliant ideas out there.
and voidhead, again, my concern is to keep people doing the art.
i don’t really do it. i know a lot about the isreali/ palestinian conflict. so what.
i’m not palestinian, and i’m not a jew.
catholic school til 4th grade.

11

People tend to consider a land occupied by people if they have like a set house on a certain spot. What if, similar to the native americans, you occupy a land, but not in the set spot catagory, sure you live in a general area but tend to move around so various places around this spot. Would you classify that land as occupied or available for use?

12

in the united states, if you achieve what’s known as an easement ,because the landowner did squat while you put in a hiking trail or plants for x number of years, it’s different from the convoluted israeli /palestinian problem. domestic issues versus international.

14

Bin Laden will always hate us. No point in Listening to him.
Late,
grmpysmrf

15

Bin Laden will always hate us. No point in Listening to him.

Well I think it’d be worth to still be hated by the man as long as he ceases trying to blow all us pesky infadels off the planet.

The British did what the United States are doing…“oh we’ll NEVER sit at the table with terrorists…no no no…these people can’t be reached”. What happened??? Eventually they sat at the table with the IRA and shit got sorted for the most part eventually.

We’ve got nothing to lose, so personally I think they should try some dialogue with this so called Al Qaeda. And as they say…better the enemy you know than the enemy you don’t.

17

[reply][reply]Bin Laden will always hate us. No point in Listening to him.

Well I think it’d be worth to still be hated by the man as long as he ceases trying to blow all us pesky infadels off the planet.[/reply]

You have it backwards. He’s the one living in a cave and being chased by bombs. He is the one that needs to give it up.[/reply]

Oh yeah I realise we bomb the hell out of the world and commit far more shocking attrocities than the so-called “bad guys” and probably deserve everything we get, even though as usual it’s the innocents that get torn to shreds…BUT…still…obviously we need to sit at the table with the mysterious Al Qaeda seeing as they seem to be the only people pissed off enough to kick us in the balls and scare the hell out of us?

I mean I know these nuts don’t want to attack us for no reason.

Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda is such a mysterious organisation compared to most other “terrorist” organisations throughout history. I wonder if we’ll ever discover who’s really at the top and calling the shots for them?

18

I agree with the needing to talk terrorists idea. I mean, open dialog is really the only way besides killing them all, to work out a problem… and since there’s way more of us then them, it’s going to take them quiet some time, and since we can’t find a 7 foot diabetic on a machine wandering through caves and mountains, again it’ll take quiet some time…

20

There is no point in talking with them. They have already made it clear what they want. They won’t get it as far as I can tell. Fear will continue to be perpetuated by those who stand to gain politically and financially from everlasting conflict. Darn military-industrial complex.

21

carmangary,being an ex military man has a lot to offer.
thanks.

22

Why talk to them? They aren’t a nation. They aren’t a govt. They are just a bunch of whack jobs trying to make their own rules that the rest of the world should follow. Should we also sit down with the KKK and see what is on their mind? What about the southern babtists? Or maybe even just the Sarah Palin followers? Let’s get all the whack jobs together for a conference and see what we can do to make them happy.

I’m going with you on this one… and I’m a little pissed you made this point before I could! [:)]
I hear what you’re saying toot, about “the enemy we know” but the fact is Bin Laden hates us for our mere existence there’s no point in listening to him because it will be the same old tired “infidels bullshit” what are we going to learn from a sit down? hell he might be strapped at that sit down… Damn it, I’m starting to sound like a filthy republican. Only in the bin laden instance. search and destroy! (i advocate that stance with the KKK as well. that might take care of about 5-6% of the republican voting block!)
Late,
grmpysmrf

23

Why talk to them? They aren’t a govt.

Neither were the IRA…but they are now.

And as I mentioned before the British were stubborn and bull-headed and kept yelling “we won’t talk to terrorists”…but they did eventually and they were both able to lay shit out on the table.

So in my opinion your point is invalid.

Like I said earlier…better the enemy you know than the enemy you don’t.

I mean refusing to sit at the table with these people will keep the attacks on us coming. What is there to lose by having dialogue with these folk? If we still can’t get through to them after dialogue at least we could convince ourselves that we tried while we go about blowing up the world and killing thousands and thousands of innocents?