Bin Laden is pathetic
Saturday, September 15, 2007 at 12:04PM ARTICLE: 'Bin Laden's new image: younger, more Marxist:The former multimillionaire now blames global capitalism and class for the tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan,' By Fawaz A. Gerges, Christian Science Monitor, September 13, 2007
Cool piece by Farwaz Gerges, with whom I did 3 hours of Japanese TV a while back (with Francois Hesbourg) in Times Square.
He impressed me plenty then.
This, to me, signals how pathetic Bin Laden has become: his 7th-century shtick doesn't sell well, so now he's resurrecting bankrupt neo-Marxist diatribes against globalization in general and capitalism in particular. But since he promises only a pre-economic alternative, this angle is about as unappealing as the previous one.
Some will hail this as a clever tapping into anti-globalization sentiment, but this is Bin Laden watering down his message to attract a wider audience, and that just ain't gonna work with his attached fundamentalist package, which remains amazingly unappealing to anyone outside his narrow religious framework.
Most of Islam's revival and radicalization is an attempt to engage globalization while retaining identity, not trying to mount some complete alternative, much less one with so many unappealing social strictures.
Reader Comments (6)
Actually, I found the entire presentation so goofy that for the first time I seriously considered that OBL could just be a CIA agent involved in some kind of bizarre psychological warfare op. It was as if he was behaving like a bad caricature of some aging campus leftist, in some nutty attempt to associate anti-globalization and leftist thought with terrorism.
In the weeks following Sept 11, 2001, I was struck by a feeling that if the Islamic world seriously followed Bin Laden's thinking that it would end up even more backwards and isolated from the world. The more I hear from OBL the less concerned I am about the threat of Al Qaida and Islamic fanaticism in general.
I think the perception - accurate or not - on bin Laden's end is that common cause and aid from, and success of the larger camp of the "aging campus leftist" in the West is a key to his victory, just as it is perceived - accurate or not - as a key to the North Vietnamese victory, modern history's benchmark guerilla defeat of the US.
I doubt he'll alienate his followers. There's an end-game war on and they're competitors, not just worshippers. They know the the winner of the war equates to the winner of the ideological (theological?) debate, so winning the war is the priority. Whatever tactics it takes to win now will be justified later when they possess the means to shape their world according to their vision, or at least the part of it they want for their own.