NYPost

OSAMA BIN LADEN COMES CLEAN

October 8, 2001 -- WHAT is most remarkable about yesterday's statement from Osama bin Laden is its petulance. I leave it to experts in Arabic and Islam to parse the language and expose the code and shorthand he used for the purpose of riling up Muslims. What's right there on the surface is the language of the self-conscious victim - the victim who asserts his right to commit any crime on the grounds that he believes a crime was done to him first.

Bin Laden's tone is all the more remarkable when you consider that the statement is structured as a celebration of Allah and of the Sept. 11 attacks. But it's really just a yelp of bitterness, and it's not really directed at the world's superpower.

Bin Laden's real target, as he makes clear, is the House of Saud - the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia since 1903. He's a Saudi born and bred, and his wealth was derived from his family's proximity to the House of Saud. He wants control of his native land. And he's willing to kill tens of thousands of Americans in a twisted effort to secure it.

"Thanks be to God that what America is tasting now is only a copy of we have tasted," he said. For 80 years, according to bin Laden, "our Islamic nation" has tasted "humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated."

This is a bizarre reading of contemporary history, to put it mildly. The past 80 years have seen the liberation of Muslims from Western European colonial rule all across the world and predominantly in the Middle East. The spilling of blood and the killing of sons have been primarily the result of wars fought between Muslims who were left to their own devices by the European colonial powers. So much for bin Laden's ridiculous conceit of "our Islamic nation."

But Western violence against Muslims is not the "humiliation and disgrace" bin Laden is talking about. Rather, he's humiliated and disgraced by the fact that the government of his fatherland, Saudi Arabia, invited America in to defend it from the depredations of Saddam Hussein - because it's another blow against his "Islamic nation" notion.

The two holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, are inside Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family, members of the same Wahhabi sect as bin Laden, are the protectors of those holy sites. The U.S. intervention in the Gulf War effectively kept the holy sites under Wahhabi control. That should have pleased bin Laden.

But he found it humiliating. And you know what? He's right. It was a humiliation for Saudi Arabia, one of the world's richest countries, that it could not defend itself against the far poorer Iraq. But the source of the humiliation was not the United States.

Indeed, bin Laden's chief complaint in his speech is not with the United States but rather with those he describes as the "hereditary rulers" who have not raised their voices or their swords to defend other Muslim citizens of the "Islamic nation." The "hereditary rulers" are the royals in Saudi Arabia (and, to a lesser degree, in Kuwait, Qatar and other Persian Gulf states).

When bin Laden invoked the Palestinian cause and the United Nations sanctions against Iraq, he did so not to justify the World Trade Center bombings, but rather to complain that "we do not hear anyone raising his voice or reacting." That's the "hereditary rulers" he was talking about. He called them "hypocrites."

You could hear that he was stung by the fact that they did not offer words in support of his act of mass murder: "When the sword fell upon America after 80 years, hypocrisy raised its head up high bemoaning those killers who toyed with the blood, honor and sanctities of Muslims."

This is why he must die, and why those who work for him must die - and why we cannot relent. Osama bin Laden refers to those he killed in the World Trade Center as "killers." That means every single one of us is, in his mind, a killer.

We are "killers" because we are parties to bin Laden's own humiliation. Our country has fought three times in the 1990s to defend the lives and nations of Muslims (in the Gulf, in Somalia and in the Balkans). Our country's covert help was crucial in pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan, the Muslim nation where bin Laden was shipped by the Saudi government in the early 1980s to fight a jihad.

We've done more for the "Islamic nation" than Osama bin Laden has or ever will. He wants to kill us for that. We're going to kill him first.

-- Anonymous, October 08, 2001

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-- Anonymous, October 08, 2001