Bin Laden was aiming at a broader audience than American voters. He was addressing the wider Muslim world. Those who shape U.S. foreign policy should note how several of the points he's making with Muslims give insight into how the U.S. must proceed in the war against terror.....

..... On the tape Bin Laden says: "Every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security." With this, he's arguing that he and his fellow terrorists are freedom fighters who are striving to shake off the yoke of U.S. oppression in the Muslim world, and that his war is a defensive struggle against that oppression. Indeed he says the idea of striking the U.S. in an attack germinated back in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanonand the American Sixth Fleet helped them with that. There's no doubt bin Laden is trying to ward of criticism within the Muslim world that his terrorist movement is about repression and religiously unjustified violence. A quick look at discussions that Al Qaeda plotters were having over the Internet back in 1998 after the Africa bombings, and that a Wall Street Journal reporter pieced together from a computer he found in Afghanistan,  shows that Al Qaeda sought religious guidance, and guidance from fellow terrorist groups, on how to justify the "killing of civilians, specifically when women and children are included in terrorist attacks. An Al Qaeda letter writer on the subject also asked these religious leaders according to your law, how can you justify the killing of innocent victims because of a claim of oppression? It follows rather naturally that in the October tape, the first point bin Laden addresses is that contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom...we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation." In other words, he's telling Muslims that Al Qaeda is a group of men for whom the killing of innocents is justified, because they are fighting oppression. He's appealing to their religious duty to fight defensive jihad At a philosophical level, bin Laden is defining freedom in a negative sense, as Isaiah defined it in his essay Two Concepts of Liberty.  Bin Laden aspires to a freedom from.......

......... needs to discredit Al Qaeda's claim that its attacks on innocents, and its suicide bombings, are religiously justified. This can only be done through an aggressive hearts-and-minds campaign that is prosecuted over years and years, and that argues with Muslims in Muslim terms.
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Posted by Hyscience at November 16, 2004 10:17 PM

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