another take on the recent bin Laden video

from Slate.com, courteousy of Anne Appelbaum...

her take is a slight variation on the one that i took a few days earlier here that bin Laden/al Queada is trying to appeal to the anti-american/left-leaning/nutroots democrat-base crowd.

she points out that:

Real or fake, the message might still hint at the direction in which al-Qaida propaganda, or at least al-Qaida propaganda designed for the Western market, is now heading. In a recent Slate piece, Reza Aslan eloquently described how the organization's list of alleged "grievances"—which now include global warming, corporate capitalism, and African poverty, as well as the American bases in Saudi Arabia—weave "local and global resentments into a single anti-American narrative, the overarching aim of which is to form a collective identity across borders and nationalities."

what Appelbaum sees as the goal:

Clearly, al-Qaida's long-term goal is to convert Americans and other Westerners to its extreme version of Islam.

it's not funny, she says...as she explains:

It would only take a very few such converts to do a lot of damage. The results of the Soviet Union's massive propaganda campaign on behalf of world Marxist revolution were also numerically small, but at the time, they were considered very effective: the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Italian Red Brigades, the Weather Underground. There are always disaffected young people—(American al-queada propagandist Adam) Gadahn is a former fan of "death metal" rock bands—and they're always looking for a cause. Conversion in general is increasingly common across Europe. Some 4,000 Germans were found to convert annually in a recent study, and if only 0.1 percent of them choose the jihadist version of Islam, that's enough to cause trouble.

the way i see it, the jihadists are just furthur exploiting advantages they already possess. even though they claim 9/11 as a victory against the US and the west, there are significant numbers of people here in the US and abroad (for example, a recent study of Germans under the age of 30 found that 31%) see 9/11 as an inside job by the Bush administration or similar explanations....and, of course, tons of others blame US policy for the attacks. a recent poll found that 63% of the French, 57% of Brits, 59% of the Dutch, 54% of Poles, 52% of Germans, and 51% of Italians blame US foreign policy for the attacks.

add to that the zillions of people who are ready to blame the US for destroying the world with our carbon emissions, our McDonald's, and our lack of leadership in dealing with the Darfur crisis....that's a lot of potential bodies for people that subscribe to "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" theory...