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:
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:
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.
