Bin Laden To U.S. Borrowers: Better Get Ditech!
Osama Bin Laden is back with a new tape (apparently), with a black beard this time around. The most humiliating angle to all this? He's probably dead and he's still beat to market the release of Chinese Democracy by Axl Rose (sadly, even China will likely produce its own democracy before Rose gets his act together).
ABC News has a summary of sorts of the highlights from OBL's new tape.
Echoing the conventional wisdom among many Americans, bin Laden sees the war as a mess and smacks both the GOP and the Dems for letting it continue:
"You permitted Bush to complete his first term, and stranger still, chose him for a second term, which gave him a clear mandate from you—with your full knowledge and consent—to continue to murder our people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then you claim to be innocent! The innocence of yours is like my innocence of the blood of your sons on the 11th—were I to claim such a thing…."
"People of America: the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there."
He pledges to continue the war against the West and says further:
"It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interests of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations."
And in a big finish, he name-checks French President Sarkozy and Noam Chomsky, and yaps about global warming and the Kyoto Accord; in other words, he's slightly less interesting that a YouTube presidential debate.
But he does deliver a tax plan designed for those of us crushed
"under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages…"
"To conclude," bin Laden says, "I invite you to embrace Islam." He goes on to say: "There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent."
Hmm, a promise of low taxes melded to arch social conservatism? Didn't this guy get the midterm elections?
Before any of you do a John Walker Lindh based on OBL's great teaser rate, check out Timur Kuran's super 2004 book, Islam and Mammon, which runs through in exacting and appalling detail just how screwed up attempts to apply Islamist concepts to commerce really are.
Former reason editor Virginia Postrel wrote up Kuran in The NY Times a while back. Check it out here.