Regardless of your view on the "Crisis in Lebanon", I realized something today which I think is worth giving some more attention. Does anyone remember the video Bin Laden made right before the 2004 election, the speech that helped re-elect President Bush? Well,
do you remember this?
I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.
In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.
Obviously, the rockets exploding in northern Israel required a military response, but it is worth remembering which side of this death match - this Holy War - we are on. Clearly, an end to hostilities would benefit the US, yet the US continues to pursue the exact opposite policy.
From the London Times:
The fanfare marking the arrival of the first American aid to Lebanon today was scorned by Esam Haider and 2,000 fellow refugees living in an underground car park after their homes were bombed by Israel.
Mr Haider, aware of recent reports that the US was accelerating the delivery of new missiles to Israel, was furious. "Why does President Bush send billions of dollars of weapons to Israel and hands the Lebanese a few boxes of food and blankets?" the 24-year-old chef asked.
"Is he just trying to fatten us up before he gives Israel bigger bombs to kill us?" he said as his nine-month-old daughter slept on the concrete floor of the vast supermarket car park in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
From ABC Radio in Australia:
The Syrian Ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, has criticised the United States and Condoleezza Rice for playing the role of peacemaker while supplying arms to Israel.
IMAD MOUSTAPHA: And the only thing she would do is send the blankets to Lebanon, humanitarian aid. Of course I don't know who will, which cargo will reach the Middle East first: the blankets, or the laser bombs that the United States will be sending Israel very soon.
Unfortunately the net effect of the Israeli offensive will likely be an escalation of the conflict and an increasing sympathy abroad for Bin Laden's world view, not our own. Which is why Syria and Iran both probably want what the US openly advocates, even more bombs and more bloodshed.