Press reports indicate that a new tape from Osama bin Laden is about to be released. This account from Adnkronos International (AKI) provides an interesting detail about how the video will be distributed:
A new al-Qaeda video containing Osama Bin Laden's latest message "must be posted to Western websites," the terror network's media arm as-Sahab has ordered cyber jihadists.
"You must spread the new message from Sheikh Osama bin Laden in every way, especially via Western websites," said As-Sahab, which produces al-Qaeda's videos and audiotapes.
In a web message announcing the imminent posting of bin Laden's new message, entitled "To the European people", As-Sahab also gives instructions on how best to distribute the new video.
"Any means of distributing the video should be used in order to get the truth across to them about their war which they are losing and reveal to them the reality which they ignore," said As-Sahab. …
That is, al Qaeda is giving explicit orders for how its propaganda should be spread. But we shouldn't accept any part of it at face value.
This seems obvious enough, but still many commentators and analysts are citing al Qaeda's propaganda as if it says something meaningful about our nation. This is especially true when it comes to our foreign policy. How many times in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the conflicts that followed were we told by pundits that America's foreign policy was to blame? This school of "thought" is propounded by people like former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who reads bin Laden's statements and takes at face value polling done in the Middle East (while ignoring that Arab regimes pump out propaganda of their own on a daily basis to demonize America and America's "policies," thereby shaping public opinion) and concludes: "We need to acknowledge that we are at war, not because of who we are, but because of what we do. We are confronting a jihad that is inspired by the tangible and visible impact of our policies."
Al Qaeda is happy to play along. For more than a decade now, bin Laden has repeatedly pointed out our supposed flaws and that his terror is really all our fault. I am sure the latest tape will have a healthy dose of this rhetoric as well as the usual conspiratorial nonsense. (Remember, for example, that bin Laden told us back in September how President Kennedy was assassinated because he wanted to end the Vietnam war and this "angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation.")
But while bin Laden and al Qaeda say one thing to us, they say something entirely different in their missives to Muslims. This is the essential lesson of Raymond Ibrahim's excellent book, The Al Qaeda Reader. Three key paragraphs from Ibrahim's Foreword explain this difference:
By now, people in the West are vaguely familiar with some of al-Qaeda's messages. Every so often, the images of bin Laden and Zawahiri surface, usually on the Arabic satellite station al-Jazeera, condemning the West. These speeches are then translated and posted on the Internet (which is fast becoming al-Qaeda's primary conduit for spreading its messages). Though both men have delivered many such messages to the West, their theme is always the same: al-Qaeda is merely retaliating for all the injustices the West, and the United States in particular, has brought upon Muslims.
Largely absent from the Western hemisphere, however, are al-Qaeda's theological treatises, which justify and glorify violence and hatred toward the West within an Islamic framework. Written for Muslim audiences, they are rarely translated into English or disseminated to a non-Muslim public. This is unfortunate, since they reveal much more about al-Qaeda's ideology than the more famous political speeches.
In these theological tracts, al-Qaeda gives Muslims reasons why they should hate and fight the West that differ from those they give in their political speeches. In the latter, bin Laden and Zawahiri insist they are waging a "Defensive Jihad" against an oppressive West. When discussing the tenets of Islam, however, they argue to Muslims that Muslims should battle the West because it is the infidel, or the "Great Satan."
Ibrahim rightly calls speeches like the one that is about to be released "wholly propagandistic in nature," noting that they are "issued with the express purpose of demoralizing the West while inciting the [Muslim community]." In their theological treatises, however, al Qaeda lays out a myriad of justifications for waging an "Offensive Jihad" against the West. Democracy, women's rights, secularism, homosexuality, sexuality, and atheism: these are just some of the aspects of Western society al Qaeda's leaders cite as evidence of our supposed moral decay. We are, in their words, the "infidels" and deserve to die. Indeed, they argue "practically everything valued by the immoral West is condemned under sharia law." That is, our Western society is wholly at odds with the fascist laws they seek to impose.
There is much more, of course, but you get the point. They really do hate us for who we are.
Ignore what they say in their propaganda.
