Tim Blair

I read the full transcript today and laughed, shook my head and got upset that the media here (except for Fox) didn't bother to report the threats to those of us that vote Bush tomorrow.

And there are a few too many 'goat' references for me (especially coming from a guy who can only put out 1 video every 2 years and lives in a cave?)

Either way - tomorrow will be a stressful day and I'm planning on taking my kid to see the Incredibles just to stay away from the stress. My hope is that on Wednesday you Aussies will still be proud to call us friends and allies. If not - is there room for me in Australia?

Come on down anyway Kathleen. We'd love to see you.

dang, First a verb and now a shout out from Osama bin Laden. One has to admit for a lefty hack, he sure is an overachiever.

I knew Tim would appreciate this news. I pictured the headline—OSAMA FONDA ROBERT FISK—but The Naughty She-Goat is good, too.

* * *

Aljazeera’s translation says:

“Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.” (emphasis added)

The MEMRI version from yesterday said that ay wilaya should have been translated as “each US state” rather than “each state” or “each country.”

I googled on wilaya. I find it in French & Spanish texts talking about la wilaya d’Alger & so on.

My take, based on this & on things which I’ve read elsewhere, is that Bin Laden did mean the individual US states but that he desires not just for states to vote against Bush but to secede from the Union as long as the President pursues the war against the islamofascists. Bin Laden would also like to get people of various U.S. states blaming each other for further terrorist attacks.

Bin Laden would also like to get people of various U.S. states blaming each other for further terrorist attacks.

Hmm, not like leftists needed the encouragement to do that.

Osama might be prompting states to secede from the Union? Not bloody likely! Oh, people talk about -- I certainly have. But not seriously.

There's just too much economic interdependence in the USA. It would take some very serious shifts in industry and state government for a secession to work (i.e., a state to be independent of others -- they'd have to go international).

And there's the issue of the Federal feeding trough. Tax dollars are spread out widely among the states, and it's not a trivial sum.

Finally, I guess Osama should read our history. We fought one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern history after the South seceded (all be it for different reasons).

It would take some powerful motivation to bring up secession again on a serious note -- and some old fart grandstanding by video tape from deathcaves.com ain't gonna make that happen.

Leftists don’t need encouragement? As if a leftist could be corrupted by his or her own imagination! Why the very thought of it! Flocks of benign leftists have wandered the newsrooms, campuses, lecture circuits, & publishing houses for decade after decade, in fact it’s a tradition. And you call yourself a conservative?

/Idiocy off.

There's just too much economic interdependence in the USA. It would take some very serious shifts in industry and state government for a secession to work (i.e., a state to be independent of others -- they'd have to go international).

Yeah, but...Prime Minister John Kerry of Massachusetts, in case this Presidential Election thing doesn't work out for him. Think he wouldn't be amenable to the idea? :)

Well Osama thinks that Poppy Bush appointed his sons to be governors of two states. He looks at the US and imagines it works the way Egypt, Iraq, or The Wahhabist Entity work. That shows the vast knowledge that Osama has about conditions in the US. I'll admit he knows how to get the lefties and the French on his side, but that's easy, just hate the US. Osama probably think that because Ed Rendell hates Dubya he can raise militias like Moqtada al-Sadr did and defy the President.

We also should not discount tha fact that most Arabs, and Osama most of all, to judge by their beliefs in conspiracy theories and other fantasies, seem to live in fantasy worlds that have very little to do with the real world the rest of us inhabit. I should have said most of the rest of us. Mikey Moore and the kiddies at DU and Indymedia are out there in Bizarro World alongside them.

Yes, the idea of states’ actually seceding has long been ridiculous. One of the things that worries me about the left is that I think they go overboard in attacking our system partly because they don’t feel a break-up of the USA as a bad thing. It gets at most a tiny weight in their thought processes. Kerry’s apparent attitude about US sovereignty—that it’s a nuisance & headed for obsolesence—definitely bothers me. If he pursues that tendency of his, that could increase cracks in the USA. Much of the world would love him for that.

It used to be that Bin Hiding and the she-goat had something going on together. Now, its the "naughty she-goat". (Sigh) Rejection. No wonder there's no smile on his face and only his mouth moves, like in a Clutch Cargo cartoon. He'll have to change his name now to Bin Wankin!

Most people in the world are more cynical than average Americans & interpret that which they hear of the USA in terms of their own variously jaded experience & traditions. This also makes it easier to convince them of all kinds of bizarro things about the USA.

It used to be that Bin Hiding and the she-goat had something going on together. Now, its the "naughty she-goat". (Sigh) Rejection. No wonder there's no smile on his face and only his mouth moves, like in a Clutch Cargo cartoon. He'll have to change his name now to Bin Wankin!

Sorry for the double post.

I think “psychopath” is a bit strong. He’s certainly very eccentric.

His eccentricity has a body count.

Also in Osama's speech: a telling pop-culture reference to "black gold".

What, no Texas Tea? Swimmin' pools? Movie stars?

Johnny, that's cee-ment ponds!

A large bodycount, seashell. That's why I don't view OBL as "eccentric", but a pyschopath. Eccentrics collect beer labels, or live a different lifestyle. They don't convinve young men to crash commercial aircraft into occupied buildings.

But he is an intelligent psychopath. He has to be to survive this long.

Osama is a commie. A complete anti-globo hippie. Check out that beard. We know he reads the Independent and digs Mike Moore. What a Drysdale! Hillbillies unite!

I don’t think I’ve ever met a psychopath. My cousin Dave, however, is an osteopath. I throw it in for debate.

That there black gold's a gonna be swiped by a Texan ***t.

[1] MY Arabic is very limited, but I'd hazard a guess that wilaya is cognate with vilayet, the Turkish word for a province (Turkey has 67). From that, I'd assume ObL means a province within a nation. He certainly seems to have drunk deeply from the well that Michael Moore has pissed into.

[2] Isn't it a telling that ObL considers "Mr Robert" Fisk our "co-religionist"? I'd bet you fifty that Fisk hasn't been to church in his adult life, and considers himself an agnostic or an atheist. He writes for the Grauniad, for Engels' sake! This shows the mind-set of the Islamocfascists. Westerners by definition are "Christians", and even constitutionally secular republics like the US and India, with very good records (by world standards) in protecting the rights of their religious minorities, are "Christian America" and "Hindu India" to these extremist Muslims. By same token, they're pissed that Indonesia is a... well, not "secular", but a "non-sectarian monotheistic" democracy, when by rights its large Muslim majority should make it part of their Caliphate.

Mr Robert Fisk writes for The Independent. Before that he wrote for The Times.

Of course Bin Laden would have nice things to say about Fisk. Have you read that interview piece? It has to be the most obscene suck-up to any public figure I've read in a while, much less an Islamist terrorist.

Also something to keep in mind the next time Robert prattles on about being the only journalist who really "knows" Bin Laden.

Also, wilayah does indeed refer to a federal state, or province (e.g., United States is al Wilayat al Muttahida). The word dawlah would be used for nation-state. Also watan, which is country. But this is standard, classical Arabic. I don't know if the Saudi dialect (or Yemeni, considering his heritage) uses the words differently.

ila lliqa.

I've met at least one psychopath, Harry. The problem is that you have to identify a psychopath by their actions, not their words. Fortunately, my experience was non-violent. But it was unpleasant, to say the least.

You may have met several, and never knew it.

I had thought Osama was dead and that this video was produced by the Muppets. Guess I was wrong. I don't think they do classical Arabic.

I don't think Mr. bin Laden understands America any better than Michael Moore does, but if he wants them, I'd give him California, New York, Massachusetts and Vermont. Maybe Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, but that's it.

The bit about only punishing states that vote for Bush is even more interesting because Moore noted on his website after 9/11 that New York didn't vote for Bush and didn't deserve to be hit.

Robert Fisk is the darling of the most leftist Mexico City (i.e. nationwide) paper down here, called La Jornada (The Daily Shift, as for workers). Easily 90% of all the Iraq coverage is written by him! It's incredible how that sob has been protected and caressed by the loony lefties all over the place. Makes me feel like puke. Sorry for the rant, but this is obviously an international effort to bring down decency in all four corners of the world.

This Fisk reference shit reminds me of Nostradamus.

The states threat is interesting for no other reason that most of the highest value targets lie in states that are most likely to vote for Kerry anyway (not a state - but DC included). Wonder if Osama thought through making that promise and wonder if he could possibly keep it. And not that that info has even made it out into the general electorate but I wonder how many Bush supporters in blue states might think twice and in the privacy of the voting booth decide to strike a bargain with the devil, secretly hoping to keep their states blue just in case?

With all due respect to one or two of those expressing scepticism about the latest translation of Bin Laden's video, and however it is used by non-Arabs, I can tell you -- and I speak Arabic very well indeed -- that wilaaya definitely does not mean "nation state". Nation state is "dawla". Wilaaya is used for a province or area inside a nation. So Bin Laden was indeed threatening individual states which vote the "wrong" way...

Well, I have to hand it to him - he couldn't have endorsed John Kerry any better than that.

Up to this point it's only been Democratic organizers who were willing to physically attack people in "Red" states, with drive-by shootings, riots, physical assaults, vandalism and burglary. There is the matter of beating up Jews on campus, but as long as the mainstream of American Jewry blames that on Christian fundamentalists it isn't worth discussing.

My only question about this is how we classify Osama's move - is this a move into the American mainstream for him, or is it a move leftward? And does his threat of violence against Republicans earn him an honorary membership in the UAW?

Like I say, I think that Bin Laden’s desire for a Bush defeat is just his short-term desire & that such would obviously not be enough. Very likely he means that US states should do whatever it takes, upto & including secession from the Union—if the President further pursues the war against islamofascists.

From “Forget Islam: bin Laden is no more than a spoilt rich kid” by Rober Harris, filed October 9, 2001, The Telegraph (UK):

Conrad describes Ossipon's mental process acutely: "The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions." Bin Laden, by all accounts, is the same, projecting a world-view of absolute certainty, buttressed by startling naivety. According to the journalist Robert Fisk, who interviewed him four years ago, "his understanding of foreign affairs is decidedly eccentric. At one point, he even suggested to me that individual US states might secede from the Union because of Washington's support for Israel." One is reminded of Hitler's invincible, lunatic prejudice that the Americans, as "a mongrel race", would never pose a serious threat to Germany in the Second World War. [emphasis added]

Osama says: Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq

He had to re-create the swamps after Osama's pal Saddam destroyed them.

Osama's threat to target States that vote for Bush, did he steal this idea from Michael Moore's comments from 9/12/2001:

"Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California - these were places that voted AGAINST Bush! Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity ... Let's mourn, let's grieve, and when it's appropriate let's examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in."

Thank you for letting me know about the most outrageous case of misreporting/nonreporting I have seen so far.....

If Al Jazeera's translation is correct, Osama was spouting vintage Michael Moore, Moveon.org stuff, and we were never told.

How many American votes were lost in CNN's "translation"?

Calling UBL a 'psychopath' may be a nice propaganda trick, but it is probably wrong. He can be a very dangerous person, seeking to impose a totalitarian religious doctrine, w/o being mentally ill.

Was Doolittle a psychopath when he led the raids on Tokyo? He even stated that he'd probably be tried as a war criminal if we lost. I contend he was not a psychopath, any more than was Sherman or Patton.

Better to understand your enemy than just tag him as crazy or whatever.

Comparing a rich terrorist to a World War 2 war hero. Nice.

Andrea,

Comparing one aspect of things (murderous efficiency) does imply equality in other aspects (moral justification). The point of my posting is to look dispassionately at what is happening, lest emotion dominate one's judgement.

It's kind of like comparing the tens of thousands of fatalities a year on the US highways to repeating the US body count of the Vietnam War - in its entirity - each year. I don't mean that the moral justification of each is similar, or that I'd greet the end of modern transportation with the same relief with which I greeted the end of the Vietnam War. But it does help keep things in perspective to compare those aspects which are comparable, while acknowledging those which are not.

BTW, I think Doolittle was a hero. I've also noticed that professional soldiers have a lot more respect for their opponents than do the civilians whom they serve. I think respect for the opponent is bred by serious need to understand one's opponent, the better to anticpate and fight him. Civilians have the luxury of ranting; soldiers have to win.

Correction:

Comparing one aspect of things (murderous efficiency) does NOT imply equality in other aspects (moral justification). The point of my posting is to look dispassionately at what is happening, lest emotion dominate one's judgement.

I'm still not totally convinced it was Osama. No Ramadan references, for example. Steyn's letter section has some good comentary on the subject. In any case, it was/wasn't, but it is striking how the person promotes on the Left's agenda. The source is also AJ. I-fascists read and have TV's, so it should not be a surprise, but how can Kerry and his minions in the press not see the connection. Bush was all class in his response; Kerry all bush league. I can only imagine the horror of the sight of Lockhart's eyes bugging out and Bob Shrum's little, soft girly hands rubbing together in anticipation of how to spin the video.

Voted this morning. 90% Repub. Dear Old Dad would have been proud. Mom will have a seizure.

Anyone else smell a fake here?

The style of this incredibly banal rant doesn't mesh at all with Osama the Righteous Warrior. He used to indulge in high rhetoric extolling apocalyptic war; now he receycles Mikey Boy. He used to taunt the US as a paper tiger; now he attempts lame non-witticisms about "butting" goats and "butting" jetliners.

Sounds distinctly like an outsourcing job. Perhaps to the crack-heads on Democratic Underground; maybe Kos?