Al Qaeda has released a tape commemorating the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. According to the invaluable SITE Intelligence Group, the tape includes a speech given by Osama bin Laden that appears to be the same one found in the terror master’s Abbottabad, Pakistan not-so-safe house. The Pentagon previously released video of the speech without sound.
SITE has translated the speech, which is addressed to the American people and includes this paragraph:
Bin Laden once again resorts to cheap anti-Semitism, a staple of al Qaeda propaganda tapes in recent years. The part about September 11th being a reaction to U.S. support for Israel is pure revisionism, however.
In his infamous February 1998 declaration of war, for example, bin Laden listed several alleged grievances. The first involved America’s supposed occupation of Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. Of course, U.S. troops never stepped foot in said holy sites. The second grievance involved the “great devastation inflicted” upon the Iraqi people. In bin Laden’s view, Saddam, who shifted the burden of international sanctions from his regime onto his own people, wasn’t to blame for this “devastation.” Instead, the “Zionist-Crusader” alliance was.
Only the third grievance listed by bin Laden referred to Israel. Americans supposedly wanted “to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.” But even here bin Laden turned attention back to Iraq, and a broader conspiracy. The “best proof” of this supposed subservience to Israel’s interests was America’s “eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and [its] endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.”
No such conspiracy ever existed, of course. In reality, America repeatedly intervened in conflicts on the side of Muslims. From the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, to the liberation of Kuwait, to the intervention in Bosnia – America has repeatedly intervened in conflicts on the side of Muslims.
Moreover, it is al Qaeda and like-minded organizations that kill more Muslims than non-Muslims around the world each year. If there is a conspiracy being waged against Muslims, it is being waged by al Qaeda – not the West, or the imagined “Zionist-Crusader” coalition.
This never stopped bin Laden from advancing his ridiculous conspiracy theory or, incredibly, some in the West from repeating it as if it contained some legitimate, rational grievance.
This last tape, then, is a desperate recounting of al Qaeda’s conspiracy theory. Bin Laden warns from beyond the grave that Americans risk becoming “workers for the Jewish money-capital” and that America’s “train is going over the same tracks that the big companies set up decades ago to serve their interests.”
Evil and greedy corporations have drawn America into its longest war ever, bin Laden argues. Bin Laden claims:
This combination of anti-Semitism and anti-Capitalism is all too familiar coming from Osama bin Laden’s lips. The former terror master once even ruminated about “corporations” being the main beneficiaries of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
In other words, Osama bin Laden was a conspiracy theorist in addition to being a mass murderer.
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
