Steve Schwartz. Excerpt:Reading the transcript, can we really believe Osama bin Laden sits and reads Noam Chomsky or obsesses about Richard Perle or imagines what it means for him to endorse the anti-Jewish pamphleteering of Michael Scheuer, the former "expert on Al-Qaida for the Central Intelligence Agency?" (Scheuer should not be pleased.)
These snippets in the OBL tape were obviously trolled from the internet and thrown together with "clever" gimmicks like the call for Americans to embrace Islam, plus jabs about taxes and the inefficacy of the Democrats. The old and aggressive Islamic idiom found in Bin Laden's discourse is missing. So is the fire. The tone is that of exhaustion, not exhilaration in jihad.
I believe, six years after 9/11, that Al-Qaida is losing badly in Iraq, and while George W. Bush perseveres with the promise he made to fulfill America's democratic legacy, Bin Laden is looking for an exit strategy.
The Western mainstream media has it backwards; we are winning, the enemy is losing, the war was inevitable and honorable. And the innocents killed on 9/11 will be fully redeemed. |