by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
RightNetwork.com<\/p>\n
Al Qaeda headman Osama bin Laden recently released yet another of his promotional communiqu\u00e9s, and like the last decade’s worth of his propaganda, this one too is designed not so much to appeal to his fellow Muslims, but to exploit the received wisdom and political fashions of the American left and its reflexive hatred of its own culture.<\/p>\n
For half a century now, much of the West\u2019s intellectual class has transformed a suicidal failure of cultural nerve into an emblem of intellectual sophistication. The quality of critical consciousness, the willingness to question even one\u2019s own way and beliefs, was indeed instrumental in the remarkable political and material progress of the West. Yet after modernity cut this mental habit loose from the non-negotiable first principles once sanctioned by religion, it became mere nihilism disguised as an idealistic striving for improvement. Now everything was to be destroyed that did not fulfill the utopian fantasies of absolute justice and equality in a world where suffering is abolished, material goods equally distributed, and happiness is a right.<\/p>\n
As its name attests, progressivism fomented these unrealistic political ideals. The failure of the West to achieve them, despite the astonishing progress that has been made in the human condition, then became the warrant for the hatred of Western culture that oozes from progressive politics, and that is eager to make the West the arch-villain responsible for global failure and suffering. As our cultural elite wallowed in this masochistic guilt, the enemies of the West \u2014Nazism, fascism, communism, and now jihadism \u2014 understood that this self-loathing was the sign of cultural exhaustion, the dying spasms of a civilization that no longer had faith in the goodness of its foundational beliefs, and so no longer knew what to kill and die for.<\/p>\n
From al Qaeda\u2019s beginning, bin Laden has shrewdly directed his communications at these ideological tics and obsessions of the progressive consensus. As he has said repeatedly, bin Laden is fighting a war against our morale, an assault on our confidence and willingness to endure that, if weakened, would negate our enormous military and economic power. Hence, bin Laden argues, kill enough Americans and they will retreat even at the expense of their own interests, as they did in Vietnam, a continual theme in bin Laden\u2019s sermons.<\/p>\n
This estimate of our weakness was repeatedly confirmed by our failure to respond to al Qaeda\u2019s attacks against us in the Nineties, as bin Laden himself said in a sermon from 2003:<\/p>\n
We can conclude that America is a superpower, with enormous military strength and vast economic power, but that all this is built on foundations of straw. So it is possible to target those foundations and focus on their weakest points which, even if you strike only one-tenth of them, then the whole edifice will totter and sway, and relinquish its unjust leadership of the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As part of this war on our morale bin Laden focuses on those issues that are matters of indifference to a traditional jihadist, but are central to the hatred of their own country that typifies the progressive elites. A brief survey of bin Laden\u2019s communications to the American people reveals the old leftist indictments of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and the \u201cmilitary-industrial complex.\u201d He is also fond of citing the control of big business over politics, fomenting neo-colonial wars and to increase profits at the expense of the environment and the Third World.<\/p>\n
For example, in his 2002 address \u201cWhy We Are Fighting You,\u201d bin Laden chastised the U.S. for refusing to sign the Kyoto agreement \u201cso that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries,\u201d stated that \u201cyour law is the law of the rich and wealthy people,\u201d and accused Americans of using \u201cyour power to destroy more people than any other nation in history \u2013\u2013 not to defend principles and values, but to hasten to secure your interests and profits.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, bin Laden told American soldiers that they were \u201cspilling [their] blood to swell the bank accounts of the White House gang and their fellow arms dealers and the proprietors of great companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before the 2004 elections, he spoke to the American voters, warning them not to support a war \u201cin order to give business to their [the Bush administration\u2019s] various corporations \u2014 whether in the field of armaments, oil, or construction.\u201d And bin Laden claimed that President Bush brought \u201ctyranny and the suppression of freedoms to his own country \u2014 and this they called the \u2018Patriot Act,\u2019 implemented under the pretext of combating terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n
All these statements would not be out of place in the writings of Noam Chomsky, the movies of Michael Moore, the press releases of the ACLU, or for that matter the editorial pages of\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and the commentaries on MSNBC. So we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that bin Laden is an ardent promoter of Noam Chomsky\u2019s books, or William Blum\u2019s anti-American screed\u00a0Rogue State<\/em>. He knows that the more such writings gain traction, the more our resolve to resist his aggression weakens, and the attraction of appeasing policies grows stronger.<\/p>\n
This is the context in which to understand bin Laden\u2019s latest audio recording, which highlights the floods in Pakistan and preaches the need \u201cof a big change in the method of relief work, because the number of victims due to climate changes in modern times.\u201d Aside from the preposterous shamelessness of this concern for dead Muslims on the part of someone who is responsible for killing thousands of them, the idea that bin Laden cares about something as mundane as global warming is ludicrous.<\/p>\n
Osama bin Laden cares about jihad, the spiritual war between the believers and the infidels, and the fulfillment of Allah\u2019s injunction to \u201cfight all men until they say there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.\u201d Like his earlier allusion to the Kyoto agreement and his mention of global-warming fundamentalist James Hansen, bin Laden\u2019s talk about climate change is for the benefit of American progressives, who have found in apocalyptic environmentalism a way to attack and weaken modern capitalism now that the old Marxist analyses have been exploded by history.<\/p>\n
In this use of left-wing criticism of the West, bin Laden follows the pattern set earlier by modern jihadists like Sayyid Qutb, who echoed the communist critique of liberal capitalism in his own arguments for a return to the totalizing political-social order of traditional Islam.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook at this capitalism with its monopolies, its usury,\u201d Qutb wrote, \u201cat this individual freedom, devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives except under force of law; at this materialistic attitude which deadens the spirit.\u201d So too the Ayatollah Khomeini, who salted his jihadist tracts with anti-colonialist rhetoric from the pages of Franz Fanon\u2019s\u00a0Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, which explains the support Khomeini enjoyed from fashionable left-wing intellectuals like Michel Foucault. Just as jihadists use Western political mechanisms like democracy to acquire power, only to discard the vote later; just as they exploit Western freedoms and civil liberties to plan and execute terrorist attacks within the West, so too they are using the ideological nostrums of the progressives to undermine our morale and convince us that we are guilty and worthy of punishment.<\/p>\n
The more we assent to these stale ideological lies, the more we confirm the jihadists\u2019 estimation that our country is built on \u201cfoundations of straw\u201d and so is worthy of destruction. That\u2019s what much of our cultural elite has been telling the world for half a century, so why are we surprised that the jihadists take us at our word and want to punish us for our self-confessed sins?<\/p>\n
\n\u00a92010 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com Al Qaeda headman Osama bin Laden recently released yet another of his promotional communiqu\u00e9s, and like the last decade’s worth of his propaganda, this one too is designed not so much to appeal to his fellow Muslims, but to exploit the received wisdom and political fashions of the American left […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,505],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-iV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3088,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-fellow-travelers-of-jihadism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":0},"title":"The Fellow Travelers of Jihadism","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The post-mortem revelations of Osama bin Laden\u2019s daily habits have confirmed the orthodox narrative about the al-Qaeda chief. Rather than a traditionalist conservative Muslim, bin Laden has been caricatured as a mentally unstable fringe figure, a narcissistic megalomaniac who \u201chighjacked\u201d Islamic doctrine\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3135,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bin-laden-is-dead-but-our-delusions-live-on\/","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":1},"title":"Bin Laden Is Dead, But Our Delusions Live On","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The death of Osama bin Laden has some symbolic value, particularly for the United States. A great power exercises influence not just through its military and economic assets, but through its prestige. A power that can be relied upon to punish its\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3107,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/imprecise-language-breeds-dangerous-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1173,"position":2},"title":"Imprecise Language Breeds Dangerous Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 12, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society In his classic essay \u201cPolitics and the English Language,\u201d George Orwell identified a \u201clack of precision\u201d as the besetting sin of politicized writing, either through incompetence or indifference as to whether \u201cwords mean anything or not.\u201d The liberal media have illustrated the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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