Osama bin Laden has apparently put out a new video, the first in three years. Every mainstream mention I've seen about this that mentions its content focuses on his call for Americans to convert to Islam. This is news? Much more newsworthy imho is the fact that his pronouncements increasingly sound like those of a typical leftist. He even gives favorable a mention to Noam Chomsky, a Jew!
Most amusingly, bin Laden seeks to warn us about "the real tyrannical terrorists." (One wonders what he considers deliberately crashing civilian jetliners into buildings full of office workers, if not terrorism?) And whom does he brand with this label -- the Bush administration? The Saudi regime? The military forces of the U.S. government and its allies in Iraq? No, he says that the "real tyrannical terrorists" are "major corporations," which he accuses of threatening human life on earth.
How does he say they are doing this? By promoting un-Islamic cultural values? By producing armaments used by the U.S. government and its coalition partners in Iraq? No, by contributing to global warming! "In fact," bin Laden rants, "the life of all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations."
The high irony/entertainment value of such blathering aside, it's nice to see one more dangerous idiot who needs discrediting jumping on the human-caused global warming alarm bandwagon, because increasingly the science is not there to back it up and it looks more and more likely that a lot of people are going to end up with well-deserved egg on their faces.
A danger to libertarians however is that we will let bin Laden's idiocy manipulate us into defending large corporations more than they deserve, as I believe we have often done in the past. Corporations may not be guilty of many of the ridiculous sins frequently ascribed to them, but on the whole they are no good friends of liberty either.
Meanwhile, we can hope that Osama bin Laden and his colleagues are at least smart enough to realize that another terrorist attack would merely play into the hands of their enemies like George Bush, and that their agenda is much better served by peacefully if ineptly parroting people like Noam Chomsky and Al Gore.
Love & Liberty,
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