Surprise! NY Times Claims Osama Bin Laden Motivated by ‘News Coverage of Displaced Palestinians’ - by Ira Stoll

...Unless the Times itself has independent confirmation or reason to believe this tale about Bin Laden’s tears for the Palestinians, or is willing to fill Times readers in with more detail about the source, it is strange for the newspaper to shift its narrative so dramatically about the “animating cause” of the group behind the deadly attacks on America in 2001.

Ira Stoll..
Algeminer..
17 February '19..

The New York Times is suddenly and retroactively blaming Israel for motivating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, without much evidence to support the claim.

A recent Times news article about deadly attacks in Africa by affiliates of the terrorist group Al Qaeda blames them on President Trump’s decision to obey an American law that required him to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

The Times reports, “The attacks came fully seven months after President Trump moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the disputed holy city, which Mr. Trump recognized as the country’s capital. Widely seen as inflaming tensions and as a demonstration of the administration’s favoritism toward Israel in its long conflict with the Palestinians, the move drew condemnation at the time from many corners, including Al Qaeda and other extremist militant organizations.”

The Times mentions that the Jerusalem embassy move “drew condemnation … from many corners” but fails to mention that it also drew praise from many corners, including from the elected government of Israel and many American Jews and Christian Zionists.

But that’s just a mild precursor compared to the Times September 11 revisionism, which comes in a paragraph of the article that immediately follows the description of Jerusalem. The Times reports, “The suffering of the Palestinians has long been an animating cause for Al Qaeda, a stand-in for the victimization of Muslims at the hands of Western powers. Biographies of Osama bin Laden say that as an adolescent, he cried watching news coverage of displaced Palestinians who had been forced off their land.”

These are new claims by the Times, which has previously had rejected them.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Flight 11, 9/11. The Day Israel Lost Her Future Prime Minister - by Micah Lakin Avni

Fifteen years ago today I lost a dear friend. The State of Israel lost a leader. I miss you, buddy.

Micah Lakin Avni..
Times of Israel..
11 September '16..
Link: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/911-the-day-israel-lost-her-future-prime-minister/

Fifteen years ago today, my friend Danny Lewin was murdered by Jihadi terrorists aboard American Airlines Flight 11. He was 31-years-old. According to the 9/11 Commission, Danny was stabbed by one of the hijackers seated directly behind him. The commission speculated that this may have occurred during an attempt to confront one of the terrorists in front of him, not realizing that there was an additional assailant just behind him. I knew Danny well; there is no question in my mind that he fought the terrorists on Flight 11. His DNA was hard wired that way.

Our family moved to Israel in the summer of 1984. We arrived directly to the absorption center in Mevaseret Zion outside of Jerusalem. The Lewins arrived shortly before us. Danny and I immediately become close friends. We played in a rock band together, worked in a pizza place together, explored the old city of Jerusalem together, traveled the country together, etc. I remember the night that Danny met his wife. I remember how they danced. It took him about 30 seconds to forget that there was anyone else in the room.

Danny’s murder was my first experience in mourning. It felt like a private matter, and I resolved to keep it that way. Over the years, I have declined numerous interviews about his life.

Much has been written about Danny over the past 15 years; most of it quite accurate. Danny was indeed larger than life: smarter, stronger, more driven, more charismatic, and more energetic than anyone that I have ever met. He had an IQ so high that it probably could not be measured and enough testosterone to fuel an entire professional football team. Danny was both a titan and a brontosaurus packed into one powerful package. His achievements attested to this: an officer in the Israeli Special Forces, top of his class at the Technion and MIT, and a technology entrepreneur who built Akamai Technologies into a multi-billion dollar company that made the Internet faster and more reliable.

After my father, Richard Lakin, was brutally murdered by Jihadi terrorists on a public bus in Jerusalem 10 months ago, I decided to revisit my decision to mourn privately. The spread of terror is not a private issue, it is a public issue; a very real threat endangering the future of our Western Judeo-Christian way of life. I came to understand that victims of terror become public figures in their death — even if this is not comfortable for their families and friends. Their storied must be told, and their memories must be memorialized, in a very public way. These stories personalize the threat of terror, highlight the cardinal importance of the challenges that we face, and force us to address them.

Now if you want to call it Gaza’s 9/11…

...The statement that “Palestinians are stuck in a repeating cycle” is actually one of the few true pieces of information conveyed in this graphic, but as so many surveys show, this vicious cycle is entirely the Palestinians’ own making. When almost three quarters of a population have confidence that Osama bin Laden would “do the right thing in world affairs” and almost 80 percent believe a war that resulted in more than 2000 dead, more than 10 000 injured and considerable destruction was a “victory” for the terrorist organization that started it, there is unfortunately no basis for any constructive development.

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
11 September '14..

When Israel bombed a few high-rise buildings in Gaza shortly before Hamas finally accepted the ceasefire that had been offered for weeks, anti-Israel activists took to comparing what happened in Gaza to the terrorist attacks in New York on 9/11. Writing at his Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah claimed that “the overall death toll in Gaza since Israel’s bombardment began on 7 July proportionately far exceeds those attacks” and – on the basis of whatever mathematical exercises he was doing – he concluded that “Gaza has experienced about 125 ‘9/11s’ since 7 July” because “Israel has dropped the equivalent of an atomic bomb on Gaza.”

In a second piece on the same subject, Abunimah presented an “infographic” entitled “The Five Stages of Grief” that supposedly “reflects on the shared experiences of grief of Americans [after 9/11] and Palestinians in Gaza, while contrasting the stages of healing and recovery.”

If so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists have the chutzpah to make this comparison, it’s only fair to recall that the Palestinians were among those who cheered and celebrated on 9/11. While there were later attempts to claim that this was not true and while the Palestinian Authority made every effort to suppress reports of Palestinian jubilation, the respected Pew Research Center monitored Muslim public opinion about Al Qaeda and bin Laden for a decade after 9/11, and the survey results document that throughout this decade, Palestinians remained bin Laden’s most ardent admirers.

(Continue)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out!
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Remembering, failing to remember, denying the obligation to remember

...As a bereaved mother, I feel a bond with victims everywhere, including non-Israelis, over the loss of loved ones murdered by terrorists. And as someone who grew up in New York, that bond is particularly strong toward my compatriots. Nevertheless, it is unconscionable for Israel to accord foreign victims, even those of our most loyal ally, the United States, preferential treatment over our own victims.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
11 September '13..

As people who have felt, and continue to feel, the pain of losing a loved one to the cynical hatred of the terrorists and those who sustain them, we feel a permanent connection to the memorial events marking 9/11.

September 11, 2001 also happens to be the day on which the Malki Foundation was formally established. The registration papers were issued that morning by the Israeli government office that takes care of registering not-for-profits. Later that day, we learned to our horror how widely the experience we had undergone a month before had spread. It has continued to spread much more widely since those fateful 2001 days.

For the past decade, we have mounted a struggle here in Jerusalem for what we see as the failures of a headless bureaucracy (in truth, it may be even worse than that) to remember, to honour, to respect the lives of victims of the terrorists.

(Continue)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out!
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Guess who's coming to dinner? Obama's spectacular failure.

Caroline Glick..
carolineglick.com..
12 July '12..

Two weeks ago, in an unofficial inauguration ceremony at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt's new Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi took off his mask of moderation. Before a crowd of scores of thousands, Mursi pledged to work for the release from US federal prison of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.

According to The New York Times' account of his speech, Mursi said, "I see signs [being held by members of the crowd] for Omar Abdel-Rahman and detainees' pictures. It is my duty and I will make all efforts to have them free, including Omar Abdel-Rahman."

Otherwise known as the blind sheikh, Abdel Rahman was the mastermind of the jihadist cell in New Jersey that perpetrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His cell also murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York in 1990. They plotted the assassination of then-president Hosni Mubarak. They intended to bomb New York landmarks including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the UN headquarters.

Rahman was the leader of Gama'a al-Islamia - the Islamic Group, responsible, among other things for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. A renowned Sunni religious authority, Rahman wrote the fatwa, or Islamic ruling, permitting Sadat's murder in retribution for his signing the peace treaty with Israel. The Islamic group is listed by the State Department as a specially designated terrorist organization.

After his conviction in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Abdel-Rahman issued another fatwa calling for jihad against the US. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden cited Abdel-Rahman's fatwa as the religious justification for them.

By calling for Abdel-Rahman's release, Mursi has aligned himself and his government with the US's worst enemies. By calling for Abdel-Rahman's release during his unofficial inauguration ceremony, Mursi signaled that he cares more about winning the acclaim of the most violent, America-hating jihadists in the world than with cultivating good relations with America.

And in response to Mursi's supreme act of unfriendliness, US President Barack Obama invited Mursi to visit him at the White House.

Puddington - The Wages of Durban

Arch Puddington
Commentary Magazine
November 2001

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-wages-of-durban/

In the wake of the horrific attacks on New York and Washington by fanatical Islamic terrorists, the world has all but forgotten the conference on racism sponsored by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa. But in the days just prior to the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) was very much in the news, and for reasons that are altogether relevant to the mass murder that took place on September 11.

While there are many reasons to deplore the WCAR proceedings, three dominant themes deserve particular attention in the light of subsequent events. First and foremost, Durban provided a platform for the expression of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hatred. Although this was not the first UN venue to single out Israel for special attack, it was perhaps unique in the virulence of the language employed, and in its underlying assumption that Israel deserved not simply to be condemned but to be destroyed. A coalition led by regimes that persecute their own people—and in some cases harbor international terrorists—sought by formal declaration to delegitimize the Jewish state, demonize its people, and mobilize a global movement against its existence as a country. This coalition would itself have had little difficulty in justifying and even praising acts of terror against Israel.

A second theme was anti-Americanism. While the most abusive treatment was reserved for Israel, the United States was singled out for attack on a number of counts, most notably as a society that treats darker-skinned peoples with contempt and where new manifestations of racism are emerging everywhere. For most of those present at Durban, America was a country to be condemned, not admired—an attitude only strengthened by Washington’s decision to withdraw from the WCAR in solidarity with Israel.

Third, Durban represented a repudiation of liberal democracy. Although the anti-democratic bias was most vividly on display in the debate over the payment of reparations for slavery and colonialism, it was inherent in an agenda that highlighted the problems of the democratic world, where countries have adopted elaborate mechanisms to root out discrimination, and minimized or ignored the much more serious and in some cases lethal ethnic and racial crises that afflict non-Western states.

(Video) 9/11 'Daniel was an inspiration' - A hero's tale

Avigail Looshi
Israel News/Ynet
12 September '11






A hero's tale: Daniel Levin was murdered by the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 just moments before they crashed it into the World Trade Center. A decade later, his family speaks for the very first time

Israeli-American Daniel Levin became the first victim of the 9/11 terror attacks, when he single-handedly tried to prevent the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 from crashing the plane into the northern tower of the World Trade Center. Ynetnews brings you a glimpse into the life of an unsung hero.

For HD  English version Click here 




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Greenwald - Israel, America, and the Lessons of 9/11

Abe Greenwald
Jewish Ideas Daily
09 September '11

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/9/9/main-feature/1/israel-america-and-the-lessons-of-911

Two heads belonging to the same monster: This is the way a significant portion of the world saw America and Israel on September 11, 2001. On television that day, we watched people jump to their deaths to escape the flames engulfing the World Trade Center. But if you switched channels, you could watch a very different scene: Palestinians of both sexes and all ages dancing in the streets to celebrate al-Qaeda's killing of almost 3,000 human beings. For the celebrants, the attack was first and foremost a blow to Israel's most important ally. And Palestinians were not the only ones celebrating.

Ten years later, the Obama White House has issued "guidelines" setting a tone for the American government's commemoration of September 11 at home and abroad. This tone, administration officials told the New York Times, "should be shaped by a recognition that the outpouring of worldwide support for the United States in the weeks after the attacks turned to anger at some American policies adopted in the name of fighting terror—on detention, on interrogation, and the decision to invade Iraq." To assuage this anger, U.S. officials would emphasize America's kinship with "all victims of terrorism, in every nation of the world, . . . whether in New York or Nairobi, Bali or Belfast, Mumbai or Manila, Lahore or London."

But there was no "outpouring of worldwide support for America" in the wake of September 11. A Pew Research Center poll conducted soon after the attack produced data that still shock. Fully 70 percent of non-U.S. citizens said it was "good for the U.S. to feel vulnerable." This sentiment did not come from Arab or Muslim countries alone: it was endorsed by 66 percent of Western Europeans, 71 percent of Latin Americans, and 76 percent of Asians.

Why did these respondents feel good about America's trouble? The most popular reason, given by 88 percent of those polled, was "resentment of U.S. power." The second most popular, given by 70 percent, was "U.S. support of Israel."

In the decade since September 11, poll after poll has shown the combined hatred of America and Israel becoming still more widespread and intense. Barack Obama's 2008 election triggered a modest uptick for America, but it was soon erased. Theories placing direct responsibility for September 11 with America or Israel rather than with al-Qaeda continue to circulate, even among the non-Islamist reformers of the Arab Spring. Writing in the New Republic, Eric Trager notes that in a recent Pew survey asking about al-Qaeda's role in the September 11 attack, the "same revolutionary Arab Street that toppled Mubarak in Egypt also registered the highest level of denial among all the countries surveyed," with "a full 75 percent of respondents recording their disbelief" in al-Qaeda guilt.

Anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism reinforce one another. American intervention in the Arab world is seen as an extension of Zionist aggression. Israel's military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, or Syria are understood in part as imperialist legwork delegated by Big Satan to its smaller regional franchise. In the fantastic universe of such conspiracy theories, there are no contradictions: September 11 was both a righteous blow against Zionist America and the fruit of a U.S.-Zionist plot.

The dishonesty of Dalia Mogahed

Elder of Ziyon
07 April '10

Dalia Mogahed is an adviser to President Obama who was one of the two people behind a poll on worldwide Muslim attitudes in 2008 that spawned a very flawed book, "Who Speaks for Islam?"

She responds to a Lee Smith piece in Tablet that portrays her as very influential in the White House and also criticizes the poll. While I am qualified to comment on her influence with Obama, the other part of her response is interesting to me.

She cuts and pastes from a Gallup FAQ about her book:

In the book Who Speaks for Islam?, we define the "politically radicalized" as respondents who A) answered a "5" when asked to rate the extent that 9/11 could be morally justified on a 5-point scale, where "1" is "cannot be justified at all" and "5" is "completely justifiable," and B) said they view the United States unfavorably. A population-weighted average of 7% fit these criteria. We labeled those who said 9/11 could not be completely justified as "moderates." We further broke this group down into those who were pro-United States and those who were anti-United States.

The decision as to where to break out the "politically radicalized" from the rest was data-driven. It was based on several analyses of where the data clustered for a natural breaking point. The analyses showed that the people who responded with a "5" (completely justifiable) to the question on the justifiability of 9/11 as a group were distinctly different from the groups who responded with a "1", "2", "3" or "4." The idea here is not that we are judging who or what a "moderate" or "radical" is, but rather assigning labels to statistical groups that we clearly define.

The term "moderate" is more of a placeholder label than a value judgment. It is similar to calling one clustering in the data "group A" and another "group B." We simply used labels that a broad audience can easily understand and remember.

This is how Gallup justified calling people who thought that the 9/11 attacks were "mostly" or "partially" justified as "moderate."

It is the bolded sentence that is dishonest. Mogahed and Gallup are claiming that the word "moderate"is not a value judgment, and that they could have just as easily called the groups "group A" and "group B."

(Read full post)
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Brilliant Defender or Light-Weight? Some problems in the thinking of Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
14 January '10

Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, gave a very interesting interview to the alumni magazine of his old college, Columbia University. I analyze some of the points made not to criticize Leiter but to point out some basic ideas held by the people responsible for protecting America and Americans from terrorist attacks.

We might as well begin by the statement I found most disturbing:

“I’m often asked if it’s a coincidence that we haven’t been attacked since 9/11, and the answer is flatly no.”

Not attacked? True, there has been no large-scale September 11 type operation but the number of small attacks or incidents that might represent terrorist attacks has risen very sharply. Like a police department that claims success in fighting crime by reinterpreting the statistics, U.S. officials have systematically classified Islamist terrorist events as something else.

Of course, Leiter’s statement sounds ironic in light of the Detroit underpants’ bombing but how about the Fort Dix plan, Fort Hood, the apparent preparations to attack Fort Bragg, and the assassination of an army recruiter in Arkansas (there does seem to be a pattern here, doesn’t there?), the shooting at the El Al counter in Los Angeles, the murder at the Jewish community center in Spokane (another pattern), and so on?

Perhaps Leiter meant to say there haven’t been successful attacks in most cases but that is also not quite true, though it is legitimate for officials like him to claim they have achieved a number of successes.

If the threat is being underrated, however, and terrorist attacks attributed to, say, mental instability, and attacks by individuals are being downplayed, this means the danger to the public is higher.

Leiter attributed the successes to three things; the first two are somewhat ironic after the Detroit operation:

(Read full article)
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Friedman and the Narrative

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
30 November 09

Thomas Friedman has garnered plaudits from the hawks for his most recent column:

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.
Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.
Although most of the Muslims being killed today are being killed by jihadist suicide bombers in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Indonesia, you’d never know it from listening to their world. The dominant narrative there is that 9/11 was a kind of fraud: America’s unprovoked onslaught on Islam is the real story, and the Muslims are the real victims — of U.S. perfidy.

Sorry, but I'm not impressed. The narrative (or The Narrative) wasn't created after 9/11; it has been aimed at Israel and to a degree at America for many decades. A totally dishonest narrative about how Israel is the source of all evil in the Mideast has been the meta-narrative in the Arab world for generations; 9/11 was its result, not the other way around, because America is regarded as Jewish, or controlled by Jews.
Nor is this Arab pathology particularly novel. Europeans of the Left were convinced Jewish capitalists were behind all evil for the past 200 year, perhaps more, even as Europeans of the Right were convinced Marxism and all its spawns were cynical Jewish inventions. Read Voltaire and you'll be surprised how central the nefarious Jewish influences are that he identifies.
Need I mention the Christian ideas about the Jews and their roles in history and theology? Hardly savory, many of them.
Now I'm not saying hatred of Jews has always been universal, nor that it's the central plank of history. Not. But to look at the post-9/11 world and be surprised by the centrality and potency of antisemitic ideas and their derivatives seems, to me, a bit lightweight.
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Great Moments in "Psychologically Disturbed" Gunmen Committing Mass Murder

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
08 November 09

[Note: This is satire designed to show the ludicrous nature of the media coverage on the Ft. Hood issue. It is not designed to trivialize a terrible event but to make people understand better what happened and how the event is being dangerously distorted.]

When John Wilkes Booth opened fire on President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in April 1865, the media was puzzled. “True, the actor was outspoken in his Confederate sympathies and viewed himself as a Southerner,” said someone who knew him, “but that was no reason he might want Lincoln to be dead.” The day before he went on his shooting spree, Booth hoisted a big Confederate flag outside his hotel room. After he leaped onto the stage he shouted, "Thus ever to tyrants!" the motto of the rebel state of Virginia.

The New York Times reported that Booth was psychologically unstable and was frightened of the Civil War coming to an end and having to face a peacetime actors’ surplus. “His political views had nothing to do with the motives for this tragic act,” it said, quoting experts.

After Fritz Reichmark opened fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Dix in January 1942 the media was puzzled. “True, he used to go to German-American Bund meetings,” said one fellow soldier, “but he only wore the swastika armband in his off-hours.” Reichmark would regale other soldiers with diatribes against the Jews, Winston Churchill, and Communists. The day before he went on his shooting spree, Reichmark gave out copies of Mein Kampf to neighbors. Soldiers who survived reported he was shouting "Heil Hitler!" while firing at them.

The New York Times reported that Reichmark was psychologically unstable and was frightened of being shipped out to North Africa because he was a coward, though this doesn’t explain his making a suicide attack when his job wouldn’t have required him to go into combat. “His German ancestry and political views had nothing to do with the motives for this tragic act,” it said, quoting experts. The newspaper urged that the main lesson coming out of this event was to fight more firmly against Germanophobia.

When Padraic O’Brian bombed a restaurant in London with massive loss of life, the media was puzzled. “True, he used to go to IRA rallies,” said a cousin, “and he would rant for hours about how the British invaders should be wiped out” but the media reported that this had nothing to do with this attack which was caused by his psychological problems. As he fired at pursuing police, O'Brian yelled: "Up the republic!"

The Guardian reported: “His Irish identity and political views had nothing to do with the motives for this tragic act.” The newspaper urged that the main lesson coming out of this event was the need to fight more firmly to ensure that Northern Ireland was handed over to the Irish Republic and that Israel be wiped off the map.

When a group of 19 terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and the fourth crashed on the way to the White House, the media was puzzled. “True, they wrote letters to Usama bin Ladin and expressed radical views but their act of violence must have been connected to their extreme poverty back in Saudi Arabia,” one expert was quoted as saying. When informed the young men all came from well-off families, he responded, “Oh.”

The New York Times reported that they were all psychologically unstable and had difficult times in forming stable relationships with women. “The fact that they were Arabs and Muslims or their political views had nothing to do with the motives for this tragic act,” it explained. The newspaper urged that the main lesson coming out of the attack was the need to fight against Islamophobia and Arabophobia as well as for the United States to make more concessions in the Middle East and to impeach President George W. Bush.

The point of the above exercise is to make the following points:

--Individuals who commit terrorist acts often have psychological problems but the thing that justified, organized, and ensured that violence would be committed were political ideas.

--Whenever an individual who belongs to any group commits a crime, it is possible that some will stigmatize the entire group. Most Americans or Westerners today, however, will not do so. The most important issue is to identify why the terrorist act happened and what to look for (including which type of individuals) to prevent future attacks.

--When there is clear evidence that danger signs were ignored because people were afraid of being stigmatized for doing their job of protecting their fellows, that is a dangerous mistake that must be corrected.

--Someone who is "afraid" of being sent into a war zone is not likely to handle that cowardice by standing up with a gun in a suicide attack and shooting people until he falls to the ground with about four bullet wounds.

--The media can often be stupid but when it censors reporting for political or social engineering reasons, freedom is jeopardized. The correct phrase is: The public's right to know. It is not: The public has to be guided into drawing the proper conclusions by slanting and limiting information even if the conclusions being pressed on them are lies and nonsense.
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An Open Question to Osama Bin Laden - or Any Other Islamist

Raymond Ibrahim
Middle East Forum
07 October 09

Ever since 9/11, when Osama bin Laden was thrust into the spotlight, he has made it a point to occasionally submit questions to Americans — questions which he apparently thinks are unanswerable.

In his last message "commemorating" 9/11, for instance, after rehashing the storyline that the jihad on America wholly revolves around U.S. support for Israel — former grievances cited throughout the years include America's "exploitation" of women and failure to sign the environmental Kyoto Protocol — bin Laden concluded with the following musing: "You should ask yourselves whether your security, your blood, your sons, your money, your jobs, your homes, your economy, and your reputation are more dear to you than the security and economy of the Israelis."

In fact, bin Laden et al. have made it perfectly clear that should U.S. support for Israel cease, so too would Islamic terrorism cease. Hence, in this last communiqué: "Let me say that we have declared many times, over more than two and a half decades, that the reason for our conflict with you is your support for your Israeli allies, who are occupying our land of Palestine [emphasis added]."

Fair enough. Yet before responding to Osama, it must be noted that, in and of themselves, his communiqués beg a simple, logical question — one that, as shall be seen, responds to all his observations and questions by making them moot.

Before articulating this question, let us first establish much-needed context: As clearly demonstrated by Islam's doctrines and history — the former regularly manifesting themselves in the course of the latter — it is a historic fact that Islamic hostility for and aggression against non-Muslims transcends any and all temporal "grievances." In short, Islam, according to the classical — not "radical" — schools of jurisprudence, is obligated to subjugate the world.

From a traditional Muslim point of view, this troubling assertion is as open to debate or interpretation as is the notion that Muslims are obligated to pray. This is also why prudent non-Muslims have for centuries been finding the question of achieving permanent peace with the Islamic world a vexatious problem. Professor of law James Lorimer (1818-90) succinctly stated the problem over a century ago:

So long as Islam endures, the reconciliation of its adherents, even with Jews and Christians, and still more with the rest of mankind, must continue to be an insoluble problem. … For an indefinite future, however reluctantly, we must confine our political recognition to the professors of those religions which … preach the doctrine of "live and let live" (The Institutes of the Law of Nations, p. 124).

In other words, political recognition — with all the attendant negotiations and diplomacy that come with it — should be granted to all major religions/civilizations except Islam, which does not recognize the notion of "live and let live," as evinced by, among other stipulations, the Koran's commands to its adherents to "enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong," (e.g., Koran 3:110), that is, enforce Sharia law upon the earth.

Now while most Muslims may not go around evoking Islamic law's dichotomized worldview that pits Islam against the rest of the world — many may not even be aware of it — bin Laden, the "man of grievances," has. (This, of course, has long been an al-Qaeda tactic: convince the West, which is generally ignorant of Islam's bellicose doctrines, that jihad is a byproduct of foreign policy, while inciting Muslims to the jihad by stressing its obligatory nature.)

As for bin Laden and his communiqués: For all his talk of Israel being the heart of the problem, he exposed his true position in the following excerpt, which he directed to fellow Arabic-speaking Muslims not long after the 9/11 strikes:

Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue — one that demands our total support, with power and determination, with one voice — and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually?

So much for bin Laden's insistence that Israel is the "reason for our conflict with you." Now we see that the conflictultimately revolves around whether Islam is obligated to dominate the world by force. Well, is it? Bin Laden continues:

Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: [1] either willing submission [conversion]; [2] or payment of the jizya, through physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; [3] or the sword — for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die. (The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 42)

This threefold choice, then — conversion, subjugation, or the sword — is the ultimate source of problems. All Islamist talk of jihad being a product of U.S. foreign policy is, therefore, false. When bin Laden asserted in this last message that it is the "neocons" who "impose the wars upon you — not the mujahideen [i.e., jihadis]," he lied. Islamic law, as he himself delineated, "imposed" war between Muslims and non-Muslims well over a millennium before the "neocons" — let alone the state of Israel — came into being.

Thus to all of bin Laden's grievances and questions, there is but one counter-question — one that, in bin Laden's own words, "demands our total support, with power and determination, with one voice" — and it is: Even if all your grievances against Israel and America's support for it were true, why come to us — your natural-born enemies, according to your own worldview — looking for any concessions?

To better appreciate this position, consider the following analogy: Say your weaker neighbor has a border dispute with you. At the same time, however, you know for a fact that he sees you as his "eternal" enemy for nothing less than your beliefs/lifestyle, and nothing short of your total acquiescence to his beliefs/lifestyle will change that. Finally, you know that the day he grows sufficiently strong, he will undoubtedly attack you in order to make you live according to his beliefs/lifestyle.

Surely in this context, whether his border dispute with you is legitimate or not, making concessions to him while knowing his hostility for you will never subside — but rather become more emboldened and augmented with contempt — is sheer suicide. Yet this is precisely what happens whenever the U.S. makes any concessions to Islamists.

In sum, we, the "infidels" — Americans and Israelis alike — are de facto enemies. It is in this context that the question of U.S. support for Israel should be examined. Being hated and deemed the enemy for temporal grievances of a political nature must be viewed as peripheral to being hated for fundamental differences of an existential nature.

When the latter, much more important issue is redressed, then — and only then — should the veracity of the former be open to debate or even consideration. In the meantime, all "political" complaints must be seen as absolutely moot. It's a simple matter of priorities.

Originally published at: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/an-open-question-to-osama-bin-laden-%E2%80%94-or-any-other-islamist/

Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum and the author of The Al Qaeda Reader, translations of religious texts and propaganda .
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