Airstrip One

Leave Us Alone - 24th November 2002, 20.37

At first sight, this appears to be the gist of Osama Bin Laden's letter, circulated and translated in Britain by Islamists, before being printed in full by the Observer, here. The telling paragraph is reproduced below,

We also call you to deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of sub dual, theft and occupation, and not to continue your policy of supporting the Jews because this will result in more disasters for you.

Now, the Observer has described this as a call for a 'defensive' holy war calling upon the West to leave the areas where the Ummah exists and to cease supporting governments which oppose the rise of Islamism. If you read the actual letter, you will see that Bin Laden describes the United States as immoral and arrogant for having the temerity to be "the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire".

Here are some choice examples:

You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

I was tempted to ask if Osama was a Republican at this point!

However, if, as Osama demands, the US was to interact with Islam on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, then it would have to abandon those practices described in the letter as immoral and derived from the control of the Jews: constitutional democracy, gambling, drinking, fornication etc. etc. The only method that Bin Laden puts forward as the antidote to this supposed corruption is:

The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

Whilst the initial demands of this letter are the removal of the West from all areas where Muslims live, the call to morality underlying these, suggests that the ulterior goal is not to isolate the Ummah from the bacillus of the Enlightenment, but to purge the corruption from the globe. It is the usual open-ended nonsense shared by Stalin, Hitler and all other would-be king of kings.