Below the fold I have attached a portion of Usama bin Laden's famous 1998 fatwa:
read the whole thing here
He provides three main justifications for killing American civilians. Or as he puts it:
On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it...This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah."
Here is why he believes his order is justified:
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
It seems to me that a majority of Kossacks view the war in Iraq through the exact same lens that bin-Laden expresses here. Of course, no Kossack thinks that a proper response to American foreign policy is to fly civilian airplanes into skyscrapers. But given the near consensus that we are in Iraq to steal their oil, make the country into a compliant vassal, and to protect Israel, I'd like to see some discussion about whether Al-Qaeda is within its rights to attack America and, if so, what methods would be acceptable.
Please do not make this into an issue of UBL and Iraq having nothing to do with each other.
The question is whether you agree with UBL's description of American foreign policy. Remember he wrote that analysis in 1998 when there was a different President in office. Was he wrong then, but correct today?
Since Iraq is the biggest issue in America today, and is likely to effect politics in America for a couple of generations, I think the left needs to come to grips with how closely their worldview mirrors al-Qaeda's.
The far left may be forcefully against terrorism, but they don't seem to disagree with the basic characterization of America as a rapacious, anti-Muslim, imperialitic, malevolent force in world affairs.
So, where do you stand?
