Probably the final update on this website. Maybe I'll start it up again eventually, who knows. Check back in a year.
In Defense of Osama bin Laden
Because I know that most people will, upon reading the title, immediately declare me a terrorist-fellating anti-American sand monkey traitor, I want to say this up front: I do not, nor have I ever, supported any action that Osama bin Laden has ever taken. I have previously on this website written a post titled "In Defense of George W. Bush." This doesn't mean that I support Bush, because god knows I don't, it just means that I felt at the time that he had persistently been unfairly attacked about irrelevant issues by a legion of brainless head-nodding Democrats eager to find the shortest, easiest-to-remember soundbites to negatively portray Bush with.
And the same holds true with bin Laden. I in no way support the man, I just feel that he has never been given the airtime in our major media outlets to articulate his viewpoints in this so called War on Terror. Think about it: this guy is the face of evil in America, yet when pressed about what he actually believes and what he has actually said, most Americans can say nothing more than "he hates freedom" and he wants "death to America," because those are the two second soundbites the media feeds to us. Our media is too lazy, too sensationalist, and too conservative to actually dig into bin Laden's public statements and tell us what he's saying and what he really believes.
I just read a book which was, essentially, a transcript of every public statement bin Laden has ever released, translated into English. There are a few footnotes in there, but 95% of the book is just bin Laden speaking. My goal here is to go beyond the government propaganda and media soundbites to give you at least a basic idea of what bin Laden actually believes, what his real motives are, and why he despises the western world so much.
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Osama bin Laden does not hate us for our freedoms. Despite all of our government's proclomations that he "hates freedom," "wants to send us back to the Stone Age," and "will stop at nothing to kill every American," bin Laden's motives for hating us are actually much deeper and infinitely more complicated.
His hatred of us dates back nearly 25 years ago, with the Israeli bombing of Lebanon. Because America is by far Israel's largest contributor, bin Laden was able to make the connection that every act of aggression taken by Israel against its surrounding Muslim states was supported, encouraged, and financially driven mainly by American interests. This started him onto the ideological path that has helped him arrive at where he is today, but what has really set him firm in his beliefs is the American actions of the past decade and a half. From American interventions in Iran to Iraq to Afghanistan to Somalia to Palestine, bin Laden has plenty of reason to feel that the Muslim world is under attack by American interests.
Bin Laden explains, "there are two sides in the struggle: one side is the global Crusader alliance with the Zionist Jews, led by America, Britain, and Israel, and the other side is the Islamic world. It is not acceptable in such a struggle as this that the Crusader should attack and enter my land and holy sanctuaries, and plunder Muslims' oil, and then when he encounters any resistance from Muslims, to label them terrorists. This is stupidity, or considering others stupid. We believe that it is our legal duty to resist this occupation with all our might..."
Most Americans have no idea why we were attacked on 9/11. Most have a simplistic view of the world, in which extremist Muslims kill us for no reason other than that they hate freedom and democracy, and they want us to convert to Islam. This view has been reinforced by a propaganda-spouting government and a media too lazy to refute them. In a speech released October 6, 2002, bin Laden lists, in great detail, the multitude reasons that he and his followers fight America, and what their demands are if we wish for the attacks to stop.
Among the reasons (these are direct quotes from bin Laden):
-"You attacked us in Palestine...It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine...Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-semitism...The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally avenged."
-"You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocitites against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon."
-"You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats."
-"Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctuaries."
-"You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and that you have not shown concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises up and has not yet sat down."
His charge that Palestine is being wrongfully occupied by Jews is a debatable one; each side has valid claims to the land. What is not debatable, however, is the atrocities that Israel, supported by America, has committed in Palestinian lands. Israel has a brutal human rights record in the Gaza Strip region, where it bulldozes houses at will, shoots civilians, cuts off the water supply, and steals the land's natural resources. All this is done with the funding of American money. This is not to say that the Palestinians also do not have a horrible human rights track record; nothing can excuse suicide bombings and car bombs in densely populated civilian areas. However, much of what they do is in retaliation to the actions Israel takes against them.
As for every other charge bin Laden makes, there's really no debating it. We've attacked Muslim interests all over the Middle East, we have troops all over the region, we plant military bases everywhere, and UN sanctions that we backed killed an inordinate number of innocent people. The number bin Laden gives of 1.5 million is an exaggeration; the actual number is closer to 500,000. The point remains, however, that when our policies lead to the deaths of a half million Muslims, the world doesn't even blink an eye, because after all, they're just Muslims. But when 3000 people, mostly affluent white Christian westerners, die, the entire world comes to its knees.
And I think this is the point that pisses off bin Laden the most, and also the one that I almost wholeheartedly agree with him on. 500,000 Muslims die? So what. 3000 Americans were killed, that's what's important. Those Muslims deserved to die. 100,000 Arabs have died so far in the Iraq war? Who cares, the government doesn't do body counts. It doesn't really matter anyways, they're only Arabs. Besides, a few hundred Europeans were killed in the London terrorist attacks, and for that hundreds of thousands of Arabs deserve to die.
This is the thinking of the general American population.
What makes one person's life more valuable that another? Why are the lives of Americans, and Germans, and British, and Australians held to have so much more value than the lives of an Iraqi, an Egyptian, or a Saudi? Why can we bomb an entire city into eradication, leaving miles of civilization in rubble and thousands of dead bodies in our wake and not even blink an eye over it? Why can we allow our bombs to strike civilian areas, murdering an 8 year old girl in 3rd grade playing with her dolls, a 45 year old carpenter with a wife and a family, and an elderly man who tells his grandchildren a bedtime story as he tucks them into bed each night, how can we blow these people up and just brush it off to the side and say, "Oh, it's just collateral damage." Just because our killing is done by men in a government-issued uniform, and their killing is done by guys in street clothes, does that make our killing acceptable and theirs condemnable? How are their lives worth an infinitessimally small percentage of what an American life is worth? Why does the world outrage and cry and grieve over the deaths of 3000 Americans, but shrug its shoulders at the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Muslims? Bin Laden puts it best: "They preach one thing and do another; we differentiate between children and old people...The infidels tell Muslims that bin Laden is threatening to kill civilians--yet what are they doing in Palestine? They're not only killing innocents, but children as well...By what creed are your dead considered innocent but ours worthless? By what logic does your blood count as real and ours as no more than water?" What did these people, almost all of them innocent civilians, do to deserve our violent indifference to their extermination?
I know your answer is this: "If they never attacked us, we wouldn't have to be over there killing them. It's their own fault." And that answer is bullshit wrong. For one, most of the dead over there never asked for this war, they're simply innocent bystanders being killed by America lobbing missiles into their country and not giving a shit where they land. And secondly, our raping of their land and murdering of their civilians started well before 9/11. In addition to everything bin Laden mentioned, we have repeatedly overthrown rulers who stand up to us, labeling them ruthless dictators, and then replace them with some guy we call "a man of the people," who usually turns out to be exponentially more brutal than the one he replaced, but hey, he's sympathetic to our economic interests so it doesn't matter if he represses his own people. Saudi Arabia, for example. We never had to overthrow anyone in that country, but what we did do was prop up a failing House of Saud government financially so that they could be in power well into the future. The only reason the Saudi Arabian government is standing today is because of our financial backing. It doesn't matter to us that the Saudi Arabian government is a dictatorship with no input from the people, that they're essentially a fundamentalist Muslim country, that they have one of the most horrendous human rights records on the planet, and that they torture their own citizens, it doesn't matter to us because they play along with us economically and help the richest Americans to get more money. They help us get money, we help them get money, we can look the other way while they stifle free speech and vaporize dissenters.
You think that the Saudis don't know the reason they live in a fear-filled police state is because of American financial support? Guess again. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
The main point of everything I've said so far is this: if you're going to occupy a sovereign country's soil, steal its natural resources, install your own sympathetic governemnts, impose suffocating sanctions, repeatedly bomb civilians, and then brush it all off indifferently, you should expect some retaliation. "Reciprocal treatment is part of justice, and he who commences hostilities is the unjust one."
And bin Laden defends his attack on innocent civilians with this: "The American people are the ones who choose their government through their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment, and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government, and even to change it if they want to...The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue attacking us and invade our lands...This is why the American people cannot be innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us."
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So what do we do to prevent another terrorist attack in America? The important thing, when fighting an enemy, is to find out what that enemy actually wants. Instead of just assuming shit like "he has no demands, he won't be happy until he's bathing in the blood of every American," it's important that we actually listen to our enemy, analyze his motivations, and find out why he's fighting against us. Listening to bin Laden, we see that some of the things he wants us to do include:
-"Stop supporting Israel...end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens, and also to cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in the southern Phillippines."
-"Pack your luggage and get out of our lands."
-"End your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington."
-"Deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of subjugation, theft, and occupation."
It is true that he also calls on America to convert to Islam, but to be honest, if we just left his countries alone, ceased our bombings of civilians, stopped meddling in their governments, and acted in the "mutual benefits and interests" of both ourselves and of Muslim countries, I'm sure our non-conversion to Islam would be overlooked. Bush keeps talking about trying to find new ways to "kill more terrorists," but realistically, if we just left the Middle East alone and stopped fucking with the countries over there, we would almost completely eliminate the threat of terrorism. Are bin Laden's requests unreasonable? Aside from the religious conversion, I think not. In fact, in the interests of human rights and global stability, I find most of his requests to be necessary.
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I do not have much respect for Osama bin Laden. He is a propagandist...lying, exaggerating, stretching the truth, and exploiting his followers' religious fanaticism to get the results he wants. I do not agree with much of what bin Laden says. Yes, much of what is written above I agree with, but that is a small sample of what he has actually said. Most of his public statements are laden with religious rhetoric, spouting proverbs and parables about how it is both necessary and acceptable that his followers kill as many non-believers as possible. His callous indifference to the innocent deaths he has caused is disgusting, and eerily reminiscent of George Bush and his administration. However, I do sympathize, not so much with bin Laden himself, but with the Arabic people. Their region and their people have been exploited, repressed, brutalized, tortured, and murdered, in large part by the western world, not only without outrage from western media, but in fact with the blessing and encouragement of the talking heads and politicians in the west.
I want to leave you on a lighter note. Because no one has ever heard bin Laden say anything positive about the American people, I want you to read this:
"Many in the west are good and polite people. The American media are inciting them against Muslims, but some of these good people are demonstrating against the American attacks because human nature is against cruelty and injustice...Good people are everywhere..."
And the previous update.
You've Won...A New Brother!
That brother being your new big brother, Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States and curious listener of calls between your mother and Aunt Myrtle as they exchange recipes for meatloaf on Saturday nights. See, our governement has started this thing that is generally referred to as the "NSA Wiretapping Program," which allows them to listen in on any American's phone calls, regardless of whether or not they have a warrant, and with almost no oversight from Congress. They claim that they're using this program to "fight terrorism," so they can "kill terrorists" in their "War on Terror" before the "terrorists" use "terror" to "terrorize" affluent white Christian girls with blond hair and blue eyes in their suburban neighborhoods.
And I don't doubt that they're using it for this purpose. But the program also opens the door for the government to basically spy on whoever it pleases. When the wiretapping program was first begun, the government said it was to only monitor people overseas. Then when that was found out to be a lie, they said that they could also monitor Americans, but only with a warrant. And then when that was found out to be a lie, they admitted that they don't need a warrant, but don't worry, we won't be listening to your calls, trust us, we've never lied to you before.
You have to wonder, why do they refuse to have any congressional or judicial oversight of their program, and why do they adamantly refuse to need a warrant to tap anyone's phones? I bet they have a log of everyone's phone conversations in a giant national security database somewhere in Washington. And I bet it looks something like this:
