Many factors have combined to mythologize Osama bin Laden. The ineptness of his enemies, for one: that we Americans have been incapable of capturing him does wonders for the fugitive’s status. The pulp-press bin Laden gets helps too. The title of CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour’s documentary about the man—“In the Footsteps of Bin Laden”—is a play on an idiom that suggests reverence.

For her production, Amanpour even managed to dredge, among many other character witnesses, a swaddled female fan, who went into raptures over the arch-terrorist. Amanpour also labored bin Laden’s Scarlet-Pimpernel qualities—the manner in which he would materialize and dematerialize mysteriously for his spectacular cameos. This enhanced his elusive aura (although in reality, I’m sure perfectly prosaic things such as cars and camels were involved in schlepping him here and there).

But bin Laden is not what he is made out to be. A clue to his limitations came when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ignored his request, via Ayman al-Zawahiri, to quit killing so many Shia in Iraq. And now two books, published earlier this year, and reviewed by Max Rodenbeck in the New York Review of Books, expose yet more frailties in bin Laden’s façade.

As Bruce Lawrence points out in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, bin Laden “bluntly denies that American arms and money (which included Stinger ground-to-air missiles, among other goodies worth some $3 billion, delivered between 1981 and 1989) had anything to do with the success of the Afghan Mujahideen in expelling Soviet invaders.”

More familiar is bin Laden’s bleating about the unacceptable presence of US troops on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. But he has never cited the troops’ subsequent withdrawal in 2003. (Incidentally, some Muslims contend Mecca and Medina alone are holy sites in Saudi Arabia. And US soldiers have never circumambulated the Kaaba, at least not in their capacity as military men.)

Also conveniently bypassed by bin Laden is that “the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia [was] at the invitation of the kingdom’s rulers, to protect it from the ‘Muslim’ army of Saddam Hussein.” More revealing of the man’s motivation is that when Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden petitioned Saudi authorities with a plan to mount an attack on Hussein if he dared to threaten The Kingdom. Bin Laden was livid when the Saudis rebuffed his overtures and turned to the US instead.

Bin Laden treats truth and history selectively, shall we say. When he melodramatically asserts (in error) that “the Christian West has warred on Islam for 80 years,” he conveniently omits that “four in five Muslims live in countries that gained independence after World War II or that Bosnia, Albania, Azerbaijan, and the Stans of Central Asia have all won freedom from atheist communism in the past fifteen years. Nowhere does bin Laden credit American policy for any of this.” [Or for the help extended to Muslims in Darfur.] “Likewise, the generally untroubled presence of millions of recent Muslim immigrants in Western countries goes completely unremarked.”

In bin Laden’s philippics, the US’s support for Israel is a major impetus for Jihad. However, unfair favoritism or not, bin Laden would still consider Israel an occupier of Islamic land, even if a majority of Americans did not—as Phew polls suggest—find it difficult to identify with Palestinian savagery. Or if future American governments embraced the Palestinian national symbol: the suicide bomber. Like his Western exculpators, bin Laden doesn’t much care that Israel was Christian before the brutal Muslim conquest. To him, and to his ideological enablers, rights to that land begin with the Muslim conquest.

Amanpour’s myth-making notwithstanding, bin Laden was not the real hero of the Afghan war; Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, and the commander of the Northern Alliance was. “By all accounts,” writes Rodenbeck, “Massoud was the most brilliant and charismatic of Afghan guerrilla leaders. [A]s far back as the late 1980s, bin Laden expressed resentment and mistrust of Massoud, perhaps because he was a pure Afghan nationalist with little liking for Arab interlocutors and little time for al-Qaeda’s romantic notions of forging a puritan pan-Islamic state.”

From Peter Bergen’s well-researched account, The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda’s Leader, we glean that bin Laden was in fact considered reckless, if courageous, in battle. He and his “brigade of Arab recruits” “had no meaningful impact on the conduct of the war,” other than to assassinate the man who won the war against the Russians. Bin Laden dispatched al-Qaeda suicide bombers posing as a television crew to kill Massoud.

Thanks to bin Laden, then, the Afghan people are saddled with Bush sock puppet, Hamid Karzai—also called the “Mayor of Kabul,” because of the limited loyalty and authority he commands.

With all his pretensions and pieties, bin Laden is revealed as nothing but a two-bit assassin, deeply suspicious of local—and legitimate—blood-and-soil Muslim leaders. This is no liberator of “Muslim lands.” Rather, bin Laden seeks to centralize power in the cause of a caliphate.

©2006 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com

    October 13

The post Calling Bin Laden’s Bluff appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Nothing about Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, the Murder Inc. of the Middle East, was divinely inspired. Contrary to the descriptions, Yassin was not the Dalai Lama of Gaza. Yet this wicked bag of bones was – and still is – labeled as a “spiritual leader.”

To call him a “moderate” is no less of a misrepresentation, unless one is referring to unforeseen developments in theology. This (now gratefully) dead yahoo had deigned to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza – only if it were to be used as a temporary base to destroy Israel.

Both al-Qaida and the native Palestinian terror networks are comprised of killers who target innocent non-combatants. Their mission and tactics are identical. Yet al-Qaida is referred to appropriately and almost unanimously in the media as “a terrorist network,” and its capo di tutti capi – bin Laden – is dubbed “Public Enemy No. 1.” Yet, Hamas – the organization that pioneered and perfected the diabolical “suicide attack” – is mostly given a free pass in news reports.

Hamas’ ghastly acts are seldom spoken of as “terrorism,” or its agents of death as “terrorists.” The Agence France-Presse went so far as to finesse a recent Hamas bloodbath as “a joint operation carried out by hardline Palestinian groups” (emphasis mine). When describing Palestinian terrorists, the American media generally prefer such labels as “suicide attacks” or “suicide bombings.” These are invariably committed by “militants,” not murderers – tough guys, not terrorists.

Since September 2000, Hamas has murdered 377 “Israelis,” wounding over 2,000 more. Members of the press like the unqualified term, “Israelis.” It exempts them from reporting that the slaughtered are all innocent civilians. Which is exactly the point.

In The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor and indefatigable civil libertarian, elucidates the moral components of the vortex of terror and counterterror, action and reaction into which the Palestinians have plunged Israel. He observes that the number of innocent Israelis killed intentionally by Palestinians is considerably higher than the number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed accidentally by the Israel Defense Force.

The vast majority of Palestinians killed by Israelis are directly involved in terrorist activity. Those not directly involved were killed accidentally in the course of legitimate military actions against terrorists. ” Israel‘s moral responsibility for these accidental, although often foreseeable, casualties of war,” he avers, “is in no way comparable to the responsibility of Palestinian terrorists who have deliberately targeted every single Israeli civilian victim.”

This distinction, one would presume, is a no-brainer: “Every reasonable school of philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and common sense distinguishes between deliberately targeting civilians and inadvertently killing civilians while targeting terrorists who hide among them” (emphasis mine). Nevertheless, anti-Zionist bigots, who understand the difference between accidental death and willful murder in “other contexts,” embrace moral relativism when it comes to the Jewish state.

Professor Dershowitz makes one other particularly chilling observation:

Israel has nothing to gain and everything to lose from inflicting civilian casualties. The opposite is true for the Palestinian terrorists. Palestinian casualties play in their favor, and Israeli casualties play in their favor.

Indeed, the reason quite a few pundits, the United Nations and other masters of moral equivalence look benignly on those who target Israelis with “anti-personnel bombs made of nails soaked in rat poison” is (partly) that they blame Israel for Palestinian depravity. Thus, when Hamas or the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades kills innocents, the “civilized” world mitigates their monstrosities with root-causes rhetoric, thus nurturing the soil for further flowers of evil.

This is to be expected from liberals. They are, after all, determinists who reject personal responsibility. To such flaming Freudians, traumatic toilet training is a sufficient justification for anything. But what excuse do those on the far right and on the (often far-out) libertarian side have? These factions pretend to have a coherent philosophy, central to which are free will and personal responsibility – except when it comes to their precious Palestinians.

Members of the Jews-Control-America crowd, in particular, have lost their moral bearings completely and go so far as to call Palestinian terrorists “freedom fighters.” In doing so, they have adopted the post-modernist leftist view of morality as a “cultural construct.” Ask any liberal, and he’ll tell you: Historical baggage exempts the “oppressed” forever from being held to the same standards as other (non-murderous) mortals.

In addition to their international exculpators, Palestinians reward their terrorists for the massacres they perpetrate. The residents of the West Bank and Gaza house, hide and canonize killers as “martyrs.”

Conversely, Israeli soldiers who are implicated in the accidental death of civilians face a critical public. Unlike the Palestinians, whose politics are nothing more than genocide, Israel is a moral society. Israeli soldiers must answer to military boards of inquiry. Israel is blessed with a free (and mostly liberal) media. And, incredibly, a great many Israelis are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

Yassin’s ghoulish “spirit” guided many an atrocity. His assassination was not in breach of international law – it was not an “extra-judicial killing.” “Under international law and the laws of war,” Professor Dershowitz reminds us, “it is entirely legal to target and kill an enemy combatant who had not surrendered. Nor need he be given the opportunity to surrender.”

Is the utility of the Yassin assassination a legitimate subject for debate? Certainly. But can we debate its justice? Only if we are prepared to grant the late Sheik Yassin legitimacy he in no way deserves.

©By ILANA MERCER
   WorldNetDaily.com
   March 26, 2004

The post THE SATANIC SHEIK AND THE ENABLERS OF EVIL appeared first on ILANA MERCER.