bin Laden

There are a number of myths surrounding what bin Laden believed. In fact he wrote down or broadcast many of his beliefs.

He was incensed by the Palestinian matter only because he viewed Israel as a Western tool and because of his often expressed anti-Semitism. True Moslems, he held, must eradicate the Jews.  Otherwise, he rarely mentioned it. Many extreme imams share his views. A Moslem in a college I ran expressed such views to me.

Rightly, bin Laden was incensed by the USA's casual attitudes to the deaths of others, collateral damage, compared to their response if one of their own died. His bombing of the West was a response to this, sharing the USA's same attitude to collateral damage.

His real campaign against the West was a reaction to the First Gulf War and Western troops in the Holy Land, Arabia. This for him was an appalling religious transgression against the true faith.

Bin Laden wanted all Westerners, whom he likened to Crusaders, out of Moslem lands. That meant tourists as well as troops. In fact, the land he considered Moslem land was also the land of Christians, Jews and other faiths, but that did not bother him.

Bin Laden also claimed all the Indonesian islands for Islam and supported Indonesia's conquest of East Timor-a land of Christians and animists-where half the indigenous population has been murdered to be replaced by Indonesian Moslems. So, what is a crime in Palestine is not one in Indonesia. A crime for bin Laden, and many Moslems, was not a crime if perpetrated by Moslems. Expanding areas of the true faith went beyond right and wrong and as for Mohammad before him bin Laden accepted genocide if the true faith was triumphant.

Not a holy man perhaps but just another murderer like many of the politicians of the time-Bush, Blair, Putin.