Why did Osama bin Laden release a video four days before the recent American election and coincidentally just as Yasir Arafat had already effectively departed the world stage? For the first time Osama took full responsibility for the 9/11 attacks against America (neither the Zionist Mossad nor the CIA did it); characterized al-Qaeda as seeking “freedom for the Muslim nation”; explained that Islamic jihad does not oppose infidels but opposes specific American policies.
He said: “Our patience ran out (after) we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israel alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon.”
Finally, Osama threatened more terrorism if America did not change its foreign policies.
Of course, he was not telling the truth. For example, Syria and the Iran-backed Hizbullah have totally occupied and destroyed Lebanon. Neither America nor Israel has done this. In addition, after Jordan massacred and exiled Arafat’s terrorists, they went to Lebanon where they proceeded to murder and persecute Lebanese Christians, ruin all civil life, even for their own people, and rain death down upon northern Israel. That is why Israel finally invaded Lebanon. (Please visit www.phyllis-chesler.com to see a 45-minute video of a Maronite Christian woman who suffered the Palestinian occupation of southern Lebanon and was rescued by Israeli soldiers and physicians and thus lived to tell the tale).
Osama also referred to “the destroyed towers in Lebanon.” None were destroyed by America or Israel. However, on April 18, 1983, a suicide car bomber (probably backed by Iran’s Hizbullah), blew up the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans; and on October 23, 1983, Hizbullah again blew up both the U.S. Marine barracks and the French military headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 American marines and 58 French paratroopers.
Islamic and western analysts have also drawn these conclusions. But what crucial clues have they failed to notice about Osama’s tape?
Osama taunted President Bush, tried to shame him – a typical Arab Islamic technique of punishment, manipulation, and control (Islam is a shame and honor society). Perhaps Osama believed that this would persuade Americans to vote for Senator Kerry and not for the “shamed” President. Osama said: “We never thought the high commander of the U.S. would leave 50,000 of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors by themselves when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child [this was poorly translated from the Arabic as it had to have specified female child] discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than paying attention to planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers which gave us three times the time to execute the operation, thanks be to God.”
Again, he was not telling the truth. Nothing could have stopped the planes. But now, he gives himself away, both culturally and autobiographically. Osama is scornful, contemptuous – heartbroken? – because President Bush dared to patiently listen to a “little girl” for many minutes when he should have been paying attention to what he, Osama, had just done: Crash two planes into the Twin Towers and another plane into the Pentagon.
Incredibly, Osama seems to be competing with a little girl for President Bush’s attention. Where Osama comes from, girls (and women) simply do not count. Only grown men and boys do. It is an insult that President Bush does not immediately pay attention to Osama. Worse: Perhaps President Bush’s quiet and visible commitment to literacy for girls as well as boys actually enrages Osama. Why do girls need an education anyway?
Or is Osama somehow undone by President Bush’s ability to contain his emotions in order not to frighten the classroom children? In Osama’s world, grown men are allowed to become emotionally “hysterical”; the fact that this may frighten, even traumatize children, does not matter. (Think of the Islamic Arab street and the hysterical quality of the funerals of homicidal suicide bombers, replete with fully armed, masked men and ullulating, veiled women.) Arab Muslim adults do not have to contain their emotions and remain calm; they can act out both privately and publicly, and in front of the children.