Juan Cole: Bin Laden tape irrelevant
Informed Comment: The Irrelevance of Bin Ladin
Juan Cole on why the latest Bin Laden tape is most probably faked, as its contents are not in keeping with his past style and wasn’t picked up by agencies which monitor radical Islamist websites:
Another clue: the alleged Usamah listed only one grievance, that of Palestine, and he framed it in terms of the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Wouldn’t he have some concerns about the US drone strikes on the positions of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwest of Pakistan and in Afghanistan? About Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan war? If this is a recent audio, as shown by the reference to the December 25 attack, why not gloat about the attack on the CIA forward operating base by an al-Qaeda double agent only a few days afterward?
It is not like him to attempt to steal the thunder of Hamas in Gaza, and Hamas has already told al-Qaeda to butt out. Moreover, if all he has to offer is a lament about Gaza, then there is nothing distinctive about that. It makes him seem as though he is hitching his wagon to someone else’s star. Bin Laden comes from a business background, and one of his principles was always to seek leverage. When a Muslim radical group already has a lively insurgency going, he feels, there is little point in his putting money and resources into it. That is one reason he never focused on Palestine. He is about encouraging operations that would not otherwise be undertaken, as against US embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole at Aden, and New York and Washington.
The diction about the suffering people in Gaza, moreover, is not Bin Laden’s style. Contrary to what is often alleged, his concerns with Palestine go back to at least the 1980s, and are real and central to his ideology. The al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in the 1980s used to get together and give each other sermons on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem on a frequent basis. Bin Laden’s partner until 1989, Abdullah Azzam, was a Palestinian activist who thought that fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan was more realistic than the PLO struggle against Israel at that point in time, and more likely to redound to the cause of political Islam; but Palestine was always on the agenda for the future.
He notes also that “nobody in the Muslim world seems to care” about the tape or whether he issued it or not, and that Al-Jazeera “demoted” it, giving a former US ambassador an unusually long space in which to rebut it. If it is him, “it is a pitiful Bin Laden trying to stay relevant by grandstanding and stealing others’ thunder”.
