Osama
bin Laden's Propaganda Offensive
By
Cliff Kincaid
He may be in a cave somewhere, but it is
apparent that Osama bin Laden has a very effective means of
global communications. By the same token, the far left-wing in
the U.S. has an effective way of conveying its message to the
rest of the world. They succeeded in getting an obscure
anti-American book into the hands of bin Laden, who is now
promoting it worldwide. The significance of the latest bin
Laden tape is that the world's top terrorist has made common
cause with the blame-America-first crowd, which finds the U.S.
guilty of everything that goes wrong on the planet.
By any measure, the terrorist propaganda
apparatus is quite impressive. Echoing the thoughts of many
others, NBC's Tim Russert noted on the Imus radio program that
it seems suspicious how Al-Jazeera keeps obtaining and airing
terrorist video or audio tapes. He said Al-Jazeera must know
where they are coming from and who is providing them. The
obvious conclusion is that Al-Jazeera has a working
relationship with the terrorists trying to kill Americans and
destroy the United States. By extension, the U.S. networks
airing the terror tapes from Al-Jazeera are facilitating bin
Laden's military and propaganda operations. Russert, a senior
executive at NBC News, is in a position to do something about
this. Will he?
It is significant that bin Laden, in his
new message, alludes to "documents" cited in the
Western press for his complaint that President Bush, the
"butcher of freedom in the world," had "planned
to bomb" the Al-Jazeera office in Qatar. (U.S. and
British officials have denied any such plan to bomb Al-Jazeera
in Qatar existed.) Such a military strike would have set back
al Qaeda's propaganda operations. Considering that Al-Jazeera
does work hand-in-glove with the terrorists, why is bombing
the place such an outrageous thought? Al-Jazeera employees
could be given advance notice to vacate the premises so
innocent lives would not be lost, but its equipment would be
destroyed. Those who reject this idea out of hand seem not to
understand the point made in a previous tape by al-Qaeda
number two man, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, that more than half of the
war is occurring in the media.
Al-Jazeera, however, is only one part of
the problem.
It is also curious why bin Laden, in the
audio tape aired by Al-Jazeera, picked out an obscure book as
a field manual for understanding and undermining U.S. foreign
policy. CNN quickly did an interview with the author, William
Blum, and titled it "Bin Laden's Book Club." It's
really not so funny.
Here's a top terrorist, hiding out in
Pakistan or Afghanistan somewhere, and yet he seems to be
familiar with the latest releases from an outfit in Monroe,
Maine, called Common
Courage Press, the publisher of the Blum book, which
distributes "political and academic writings from a
progressive-left perspective."
In the audio message, in which he
announces new attacks against the U.S., bin Laden declares
that it is "useful" to read the book, Rogue State,
because it documents the sinister nature of U.S. foreign
policy. The book has an entire section on how the U.S. is
guilty of using weapons of mass destruction.
Blum tells me in an email that Osama bin
Laden's favorable citation of his book was a welcome
development. "I hope it helps my book sales," Blum
says. "I'm swamped with media interviews."
Blum says
that if he were president, he would cut the U.S. defense
budget by 90 percent and "announce that America's global
interventions have come to an end and inform Israel that it is
no longer the 51st state of the union…"
The fact that bin Laden would cite the
Blum book demonstrates that bin Laden is counting on a fifth
column in the U.S. to undermine the war on terrorism and hand
him a victory on the battlefield. Blum said, however, that
"The fact that bin Laden and I share a strong dislike for
certain parts of U.S. foreign policy and a liking for a
certain book of mine should not make anyone jump to various
conclusions. I do not like religious fundamentalists of any
stripe, nor the societies they set up, but I can understand
why [they] hate U.S. foreign policy and feel a need to
retaliate against it." In Blum's world, it seems that the
U.S. is by far the greater threat.
It is useful to consider Blum's
background. He is a former U.S. State Department employee and
worked with CIA defector Philip Agee and his associates in the
1970s "on their project of exposing CIA personnel and
their misdeeds." Agee's associates included Cuban
Communist intelligence personnel. Agee fled the U.S. and lives
in Cuba today but Blum continues to work in the U.S. as an
"investigative journalist," appearing regularly on
college campuses to denounce the "American empire."
In an essay
written before the 2004 presidential election, Blum said that
Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry had said some
correct things about the situation in Haiti, where the Marxist
Jean Bertrande Aristide was then trying to hang on to power,
but that his overall approach to U.S. foreign policy was not
that different from Bush's. Kerry was just another
"establishment politician," Blum said. A story
about his appearance on one college campus said that "he
prefers Ralph Nader because he thinks Sen. John Kerry is no
better than President George Bush."
Rogue State has been published
in 13 different languages, including Arabic.
Blum was hoping to attend the Havana
2006 Book Fair in Communist Cuba to promote another book, Killing
Hope, also about U.S. interventions in the world.
However, he says the U.S. refused to let him travel to the
communist island. A Cuban publication referred to Blum as an
"outstanding writer" and said that Killing Hope
has already been published in Spanish by a Cuban publishing
house. Perhaps the Arabic version is to follow. If so, it may
be the next selection in the bin Laden book club.
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