Entries tagged with “al Qaeda” from Reality Window

The editor and publisher of the Moroccan newsweekly magazines TelQuel and Nichane, Ahmed Benchemsi, has an interesting post in Newsweek about Obama and al Zawahri's video message last week. He makes three very good points. First:

The video message from Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he called Barack Obama a "house Negro," demonstrates, if anything, that the terrorists are always damn good in PR. You feel disgusted? Horrified? That's exactly their aim. In this regard, Zawahiri's diabolical comparison of Obama and Malcolm X ("an honorable American who converted to Islam," as Zawahiri put it) is an even bolder move: not only do they insult the American president-elect, but they rub it into one of America's deepest wounds--the racial divisions and the profound antagonisms generated by Malcolm X's radical claims. In terms of "hatred arts," this is just brilliant. Those who are shocked by Zawahiri's words have merely to remember: spreading hate is the terrorists' job. Hating you is not enough; they also need you to hate them, so the struggle goes on unchallenged.

Al Qaeda and all its followers badly need to perpetuate Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" paradigm. The West and Islam are deadly enemies, in the radicals' view. The more irreconcilable the former, the happier the latter. In this regard, the agenda of Bush and the neocons was a true blessing for the terrorists.

His second point:

Al Qaeda's true problem with Obama has indeed nothing to do with the color of his skin. By proposing to meet Iran's Ahmadinejad without preconditions instead of just bombing him out, the American president-elect thinks outside of the confrontation box. The radicals just hate that. And above all, they hate the idea of the United States resuming the chase of Al Qaeda operatives in the mountains of the Pakistan-Afghanistan borders. He's coming to them, how could they not react fiercely?

And his third point which underscores Obama's transformational impact on the perception of America by non-citizens, and in particular, moderate Muslims in other countries of the world.

There is something else, which I witness everyday in the streets of Casablanca, where I live: Muslims tend to claim Obama as their own--because he's black, because he comes from an oppressed minority, because his middle name is Hussein. ... Not that they think Obama is a Muslim himself--he made clear that he was not. Yet he could have been. His father was. Anyway, this man looks like a "brother" to many Muslims, which is indeed a good thing for the prospect of global peace.

Not surprisingly, Zawahiri's video message targeted this specific point: "Obama is not a Muslim, he's a renegade who abandoned his ancestor's religion to embrace the 'crusaders faith' and the 'Zionists' ideology'," Zawahiri suggests. The genuine message being: please don't like him!

Well, too bad for them: we do. We will like him more, of course, if he keeps his promise of backing out of Iraq within 16 months and putting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on track. Meanwhile, let's all of us, Muslims and Westerners, take advantage of the honeymoon period. And let's enjoy the terrorists' embarrassment: it's a rare occasion.

It's good to see a presumably moderate Muslim speaking out on the hate-mongering of al Qaeda and pointing out how Obama's approach undercuts it. We need more like him.

Today is a day to remember the 7th anniversary of the PDB delivered to President Bush. The one he received with the comment:

"All right. You've covered your ass now."

The one about which Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor, said:

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

The day after he received the memo the Washington Post noted, "Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hot-weather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday" .

Per ThinkProgress,

Here's how the administration reacted, according to the 9/11 Commission report:

-- [President Bush] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so. [p. 260]

-- We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. DCI Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford, Texas, on August 17 and participated in the PDB briefings of the President between August 31 (after the President had returned to Washington) and September 10. But Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. [p. 262]

Today -- 2,557 days later -- Bin Laden still remains free and "determined to strike in U.S."

Tell me now.

How is it that Republican administrations keep us safer?

How is it that invading Iraq made us safer?

Don't give this administration a 3rd term.

For more information, please check GWU's The National Security Archive.

H/T to ek hornbeck, the smoking gun, ThinkProgress, and Crooks and Liars.