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> The Guardian has removed a letter written by Osama Bin Laden, explaining his war against the United States is partly because of its support of Israel, after i

> The Guardian has removed a letter written by Osama Bin Laden, explaining his war against the United States is partly because of its support of Israel, after it had gone viral on TikTok. If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom". That was the narrative on TV nonstop and any wavering from full support of the wars or "supporting the troops" was tantamount to supporting terrorists. The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters, who then go on to attack again killing more civilians, creating more radicals on the other side, who then bomb killing even more civilians. It's a cycle that never ends.

kiba 3y ago
The terrorists don't like the US for many reasons, some of them seem legitimate. Either way, they're still folks who hijacked planes and crashed them into the towers. The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters, who then go on to attack again killing more civilians, creating more radicals on the other side, who then bomb killing even more civilians. It's a cycle that never ends. I am sure some of them viewed themselves as freedom fighters, and that us dropping bombs which inflict collateral damage generates the kind of people who are willing to fight the US. That doesn't make them heroes or martyrs.
- kyruzic 3y ago
  Dropping bombs on innocent civilians in a third world country doesn't make you a hero either, but that doesn't stop our media from calling all members of the military involved in the wars in the middle East heroes. Also read more carefully they never said the "terrorists" were heroes they explained the point of view of the "terrorists"
  - beebmam 3y ago
    > Dropping bombs on innocent civilians in a third world country Is this really what political analysis has stooped to on HN in 2023? A total abdication of any attempt at nuance, or framing, or examining underlying intentions. Such a shame.
    - kyruzic 3y ago
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    - topato 3y ago
      I'm starting to think there needs to be a "born post 9/11' disclaimer, as I believe living through that period, while remaining acutely aware of what happened in the Middle East during that period, is where the nuance originates
      - nonethewiser 3y ago
        There is a shocking amount of hindsight bias with the US war in the middle east which seems to entirely forget 9/11. Including those who remember 9/11.
        tachyons 3y ago
        If we go by the number of civilians who got killed and the loss of infrastructure, You can compare the impact of 9/11 and the so called counter operation. Assuming you consider value of civilian life is same for a US citizen and a non US citizen.
        hnbad 3y ago
        As someone who was old enough on 9/11 to be able to follow the events in real time (watching CNN while also following discussions on news aggregator websites at the time - yeah, those already were a thing): 9/11 did not justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, nor the erosion of American civil liberties, nor the mass surveillance against its own allies later uncovered by Snowden. That the evidence used to justify the invasion of Iraq was fabricated was blatantly obvious at the time and foreign heads of state's statements on it were based more on diplomacy than credibility. The invasion of Afghanistan was easier to justify due to the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan at the time and the cooperation of the Taliban with Al Qaeda but it was widely understood as being motivated by retaliation against Islamism more broadly rather than an attempt to take out the group that orchestrated the attacks. Neither invasion was justified by international law, not that this matters given that the US is not party to the International Criminal Court and has previously pledged to take military action against anyone attempting to extradite US citizens to the Hague. 9/11 was a horrible loss of civilian life and the collapse of the towers itself was a horrific mass death event even without taking any of the planes into account. But the US's invasions and occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq had a civilian death count far exceeding 9/11 and the US deliberately arrested "enemy combatants" and held and tortured them with no legal recourse, often for years without trial. Not to mention the state of the entire region during and after the occupation leading to the rise of ISIS and the return of the Taliban to power after the toothless puppet regime in Afghanistan collapsed. That Al Qaeda was the Bad Guy doesn't make the US the Good Guy. At best the US is the Less Bad Guy. Preferable but not to be celebrated. A lot of people born after 9/11 also have no recollection of the levels of racism and jingoism that followed the event: Muslims being ostracized and openly attacked, brown people in general being mistreated on suspicion of being Muslim, the lengths American corporations went to to spite the French for voicing concern when the US announced its intend to enter war in the Middle East. And a lot of people think they are seeing exactly the same play out in Israel and Gaza since the Oct 7th attacks, except Israel didn't even take time to mourn the victims (or track the hostages) before engaging in a month-long retaliatory bombing campaign with a mind-boggling death toll.
- black_thoughts 3y ago
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  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    What on earth makes you think this is an appropriate place to post 4chan links, or that anyone interested in sane discussion would click that? If you have an argument to make, make it here. I still can't tell if you're insane because you think it's an inside job, or you're insane because you think some anonymous 4chan user is the top source to prove the alternative.
    - black_thoughts 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - figgernnaggot 3y ago
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- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  >The terrorists don't like the US for many reasons, some of them seem legitimate. This is a good quote. However you can say this about any critic, journalist, voter, or billionaire. We should be worried about the ones that don't like it 24/7/365, and have their entire life's meaning centered around not liking the US.
  - Bamafan 3y ago
    They don't just "not like the US". The US is actively terrorizing their homelands.
Daz1 3y ago
>The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters. "It's your fault I hit you, because you made me mad."
arp242 3y ago
The Bush era rhetoric was stupid, but it wasn't completely wrong in the sense that some of these people really are evil. "One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" is just as simplistic and wrong as "terrorists hate our freedom". Some people consider Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, Brendan Tarrant, etc. "freedom fighters". Some of these "freedom fighters" literally strap bombs to small children and send them to troops or civilian targets to explode. e.g. Boko Haram, but Hamas has also done this (although they stopped quite a few years ago). etc. etc. I feel conferable in saying that this is evil no matter the context, and that we need to fight this. Full stop, end of story. There is lot of variety here. In the end I feel that "terrorist" is a meaningless classifier, and you need to look at the full context.
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  Powers will tend to declare their means of war legitimate and the means of war available to their enemies to be illegitimate. I think it's simplistic to declare our enemies "evil" because they're denied access (fortunately) to the kinds of expensive weapons systems that our own propaganda views with approval.
  - arp242 3y ago
    Are you seriously saying that going to a Labour party youth camp to kill teenagers one by one to "eliminate the next generation of leftist" is somehow not evil? Or that strapping a bomb to a random kidnapped 9-year old girl is not evil? It is Evil. Full stop. No discussion. Whether someone else is also evil or not doesn't even come in to play.
    - Aloha 3y ago
      Agreed. Intentionally trying to blow up non-combatants is bad - and there is no way to make it good. Its one thing if non-combatants are collateral damage (war is dirty), its another thing entirely if ones intention is to intentionally kill civilians.
      - 3y ago
junofan 3y ago
The suitcases of cash handed to leaders are probably a bigger factor in their ignoring normal diplomatic channels.
dingnuts 3y ago
> on the other side of the coin in this case the other side of the coin is Salafists, who can rightfully go fuck themselves
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
one of the stated reasons by Bin Laden was US military bases in that side of the world, particularly in Saudi
tehnub 3y ago
From wikipedia [0]: >Raymond Ibrahim, as a researcher at the Library of Congress, found a significant difference between Al Qaeda's messages in English directed to a Western audience and al Qaeda's Arab messages and documents directed to an Islamic audience. The Western-directed messages listed grievances as grounds for retaliation employing the "language of 'reciprocity.'" Literature for Islamic audiences contained theological motivations bereft of references to the acts of Western nations. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks#Religious_motivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_a...
- Aurornis 3y ago
  Why would you include only that section but omit the one above it that contains a theory that the motivations were indeed religious and intended as acts against those who don’t share their religious and cultural beliefs (aka the West and other locations with freedom of religion) > Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, in their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, argue that the 9/11 terrorist attacks are purely religious. They are seen as "a sacrament ... intended to restore to the universe a moral order that had been corrupted by the enemies of Islam." It is neither political nor strategic but an "act of redemption" meant to "humiliate and slaughter those who defied the hegemony of God."
  - tehnub 3y ago
    I wonder if you misunderstood me or what I quoted. I was trying to argue against the person I replied to by showing evidence that those "grievances" aren't necessarily the true motive. If I understand your other post correctly, you agree with this.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      The grievances (air quotes are inappropriate here) listed may not necessarily be the true motive, but they sure seem to be the true motive based on the evidence we see.
      - 3y ago
Aurornis 3y ago
This is extraordinarily reductive and unnecessarily cynical. > If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom". That was the narrative on TV nonstop A significant part of that particular brand of terrorism is indeed hostile to cultures that don’t share their religious and cultural beliefs. We can’t reduce all of their motivations to singular slogans that fit neatly into TV commercials, but it is actually true that they are aligned against a secular international order with associated freedom of religion, among many other freedoms. If you were trying to make a cheeky point about how a private entity choosing to take down Osama Bin Laden’s letter is somehow infringing on our freedoms, that’s ironic because they are a private business that is free to choose what they do and do not publish. Ironically, freedom of the press is something very much absent in regimes where these terrorists operate. > The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin Not that simple. You think Palestinians love being beholden to the terrorist leadership that refuses to allow elections, is known for stealing their humanitarian aid to enrich themselves on the order of billions of dollars, and operates safely from a foreign country?
- yowzadave 3y ago
  > it is actually true that they are aligned against a secular international order with associated freedom of religion, among many other freedoms Yes—there was at that time, and there remains to this day, a strong criticism of the US in that part of the world that it is a “decadent” society—which is really another way of saying that there are many freedoms that people avail themselves of that they disagree with.
- kingofpandora 3y ago
  > Not that simple. You think Palestinians love being beholden to the terrorist leadership that refuses to allow elections, is known for stealing their humanitarian aid to enrich themselves on the order of billions of dollars, and operates safely from a foreign country? According to large segments of the political class in the US, yes they do love it. And in fact they are legitimate targets of the Israeli military because of it.
scythe 3y ago
>If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom". The funny part is how close, and yet how far, this is to/from the truth. You know that old quip about freedom versus security? The visceral motivation for a bunch of well-educated and well-paid reactionaries (which is who they were — the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates have university degrees and grew up in nice houses) was that Americans were safe and their countrymen were not. They hated us for our security; they didn't care about freedom.
Protostome 3y ago
They consider themselves freedom fighters, because the notion of freedom is totally different for them. Freedom doesn't include being gay, a woman with actual rights, a minority that's not a muslim and so on. Moreover, their historical narrative is twisted to fit their objective - the creation of a wold-wide califate. So yes, when freedom is based and defined by this narrative, you could call them freedom fighters.
- hnbad 3y ago
  Sure, this describes the ideological core of Islamist groups like Al Qaeda. But this also ignores the power dynamics they exist and flourish in. The problem with "freedom fighters" is that they can be both: they can be fighting for freedom while also fighting for the right to subjugate others. The latter is often accepted if the desire for the former is strong enough. Dropping bombs on people lowers the threshold for this radicalization substantially. And if you want to be particularly uncharitable you could argue that as long as the US is not actively pivoting to isolationism (and especially so during the "world police" era until the late '00s) the US's objective was to maintain a world order with itself at the top of the hierarchy. "Liberating" other countries was historically more about making their economies accessible to US interests (and pre-collapse also shutting out the Soviet Union). I'd take US corporate privatization over the caliphate any day but that doesn't mean the former represents freedom in a way I agree with, just that it is a closer match or more compatible.
  - Protostome 3y ago
    I completely agree, however, there's one thing in the core of their ideology that's different than the typical US/western european capitalism - their moral compass is absolute, derived from the Quran. It means basically, that there's very little wiggle room, you can't really negotiate with someone who believes he/she acts on orders from a divine entity. That's why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unsolved for so many years ...
    - hnbad 3y ago
      I think it's odd to suggest that the Israel-Palestine conflict is perpetuated by Islamism when Israel's own existence hinges on a moral absolute. There is a small but influential undercurrent among Israeli Zionists who believe in the creation of Greater Israel, ethnically cleansing not only all of the current borders of Israel (including Gaza and the West Bank) but also historical Transjordan and territories all the way to the Nile (i.e. all of Jordan as well as parts of Syria, Saudia Arabia and Egypt): https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions... Eliminationist rhetoric has repeatedly made its way into statements by government politicians and even programming by the Israeli national broadcaster (Kan) as in the recently broadcasted and immediately de-archived "friendship song" video: https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/national/music-video-of-israeli-children-singing-we-will-annihilate-everyone-in-gaza-shocks-world/ar-AA1kd0s5 https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/national/music-video-of-israe... The early Zionist project in Palestine was explicitly described as colonialist by key members and the expulsion of the non-Jewish Palestinian population as an explicit aspect of it. The support of Western governments including the UK pre-1945 was based more on antisemitism than genuine goodwill, ranging from the idea that having "all the Jews in one place" made them easier to handle (or eliminate - which was why the Nazi government tolerated Zionist transfers of German Jews to Palestine until WW2 shut down all emigration) to the British idea during WW2 that "giving them what they want" would give you an "in" with "the international bankers" (basically the reverse side of the Jewish conspiracy theories): https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-10-26/ty-article/the-balfour-declarations-racism-and-why-it-still-matters/0000017f-dba4-db22-a17f-ffb5fdd10000 https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-10-26/ty-article/the-ba... It's also impossible to mention the Israel-Palestine conflict itself without mentioning how Israel effectively helped bolster (Islamist) Hamas in order to combat the (secular, socialist-leaning) Fatah: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30... ... or how current PM Netanyahu supported the calls for the murder of his more moderate predecessor Rabin that preceded his assassination: https://www.timesofisrael.com/labor-chief-michaeli-rabin-was-assassinated-with-netanyahus-cooperation/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/labor-chief-michaeli-rabin-was... Heck, if you go back to the time Hamas was actually elected in Gaza (and many Gazans alive today weren't alive at the time, let alone old enough to participate in the election), their messaging was a lot more ideologically (and religously) moderate and closer to that of Fatah, even if they already were Islamists and eliminationist antisemites internally. Note that Palestinians in Gaza haven't had another election since and public opinion among Gazans seems to be very much divided. In effect, the Zionists through the creation of Israel and the domestic and military conflicts that sprang from it created a Palestinian diaspora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return) which is being mistreated in the countries it has sought refuge in. At the same time, Israel's existence in explicit opposition to its neighbors' cultures and ethnicities while in close alliance with Western powers and the US in particular is seen as a geopolitical threat by its neighbors and especially those countries that are aligned opposite to the US - this more than any religious motivations seems the main motivation behind Iran's support of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Islamism definitely plays a part in this and Islamists do lend themselves more towards carrying out the terrorist attacks and missile strikes against Israel as none of its neighbors could risk an all-out war even without direct involvement of the US military. But as always in geopolitics it runs much deeper than one group's religious dogma. And I haven't even mentioned how certain Evangelical Christians shaped US politics on Israel because the reestablishment of Israel as a "Jewish state" (and the extermination of those same Jews) is an integral part of their mythology of the "end times" (and salvation). There are very unhealthy beliefs about Israel/Palestine present in all three Abrahamic religions, to say the least.
simonsarris 3y ago
> If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom" The letter very clearly states that they don't like freedom! It very specifically calls out permissiveness of sex, gays, banking (as every western nation sees it, contra Islamic banking), gambling, alcohol, and separation of church and state as evils: > (a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest. > (b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind: > (i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. > (iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object. Mad we didn't behead old Bill: > Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?
- 93po 3y ago
  It’s funny how it’s okay to call those things evil if you’re a conservative Christian group but we cling onto the same words as one of the justifications to kill and attack another group
  - not_the_fda 3y ago
    In some circles they are called Y'all Qaeda
    - sshine 3y ago
      I guess the similarity falls short of justifying bombing civilians in another country... oh, wait.

kiba 3y ago

The terrorists don't like the US for many reasons, some of them seem legitimate. Either way, they're still folks who hijacked planes and crashed them into the towers. The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters, who then go on to attack again killing more civilians, creating more radicals on the other side, who then bomb killing even more civilians. It's a cycle that never ends. I am sure some of them viewed themselves as freedom fighters, and that us dropping bombs which inflict collateral damage generates the kind of people who are willing to fight the US. That doesn't make them heroes or martyrs.

kyruzic 3y ago
Dropping bombs on innocent civilians in a third world country doesn't make you a hero either, but that doesn't stop our media from calling all members of the military involved in the wars in the middle East heroes. Also read more carefully they never said the "terrorists" were heroes they explained the point of view of the "terrorists"
- beebmam 3y ago
  > Dropping bombs on innocent civilians in a third world country Is this really what political analysis has stooped to on HN in 2023? A total abdication of any attempt at nuance, or framing, or examining underlying intentions. Such a shame.
  - kyruzic 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - topato 3y ago
    I'm starting to think there needs to be a "born post 9/11' disclaimer, as I believe living through that period, while remaining acutely aware of what happened in the Middle East during that period, is where the nuance originates
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      There is a shocking amount of hindsight bias with the US war in the middle east which seems to entirely forget 9/11. Including those who remember 9/11.
      - tachyons 3y ago
        If we go by the number of civilians who got killed and the loss of infrastructure, You can compare the impact of 9/11 and the so called counter operation. Assuming you consider value of civilian life is same for a US citizen and a non US citizen.
      - hnbad 3y ago
        As someone who was old enough on 9/11 to be able to follow the events in real time (watching CNN while also following discussions on news aggregator websites at the time - yeah, those already were a thing): 9/11 did not justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, nor the erosion of American civil liberties, nor the mass surveillance against its own allies later uncovered by Snowden. That the evidence used to justify the invasion of Iraq was fabricated was blatantly obvious at the time and foreign heads of state's statements on it were based more on diplomacy than credibility. The invasion of Afghanistan was easier to justify due to the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan at the time and the cooperation of the Taliban with Al Qaeda but it was widely understood as being motivated by retaliation against Islamism more broadly rather than an attempt to take out the group that orchestrated the attacks. Neither invasion was justified by international law, not that this matters given that the US is not party to the International Criminal Court and has previously pledged to take military action against anyone attempting to extradite US citizens to the Hague. 9/11 was a horrible loss of civilian life and the collapse of the towers itself was a horrific mass death event even without taking any of the planes into account. But the US's invasions and occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq had a civilian death count far exceeding 9/11 and the US deliberately arrested "enemy combatants" and held and tortured them with no legal recourse, often for years without trial. Not to mention the state of the entire region during and after the occupation leading to the rise of ISIS and the return of the Taliban to power after the toothless puppet regime in Afghanistan collapsed. That Al Qaeda was the Bad Guy doesn't make the US the Good Guy. At best the US is the Less Bad Guy. Preferable but not to be celebrated. A lot of people born after 9/11 also have no recollection of the levels of racism and jingoism that followed the event: Muslims being ostracized and openly attacked, brown people in general being mistreated on suspicion of being Muslim, the lengths American corporations went to to spite the French for voicing concern when the US announced its intend to enter war in the Middle East. And a lot of people think they are seeing exactly the same play out in Israel and Gaza since the Oct 7th attacks, except Israel didn't even take time to mourn the victims (or track the hostages) before engaging in a month-long retaliatory bombing campaign with a mind-boggling death toll.
black_thoughts 3y ago
[flagged]
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  What on earth makes you think this is an appropriate place to post 4chan links, or that anyone interested in sane discussion would click that? If you have an argument to make, make it here. I still can't tell if you're insane because you think it's an inside job, or you're insane because you think some anonymous 4chan user is the top source to prove the alternative.
  - black_thoughts 3y ago
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  - figgernnaggot 3y ago
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1970-01-01 3y ago
>The terrorists don't like the US for many reasons, some of them seem legitimate. This is a good quote. However you can say this about any critic, journalist, voter, or billionaire. We should be worried about the ones that don't like it 24/7/365, and have their entire life's meaning centered around not liking the US.
- Bamafan 3y ago
  They don't just "not like the US". The US is actively terrorizing their homelands.

Daz1 3y ago

>The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters. "It's your fault I hit you, because you made me mad."

arp242 3y ago

The Bush era rhetoric was stupid, but it wasn't completely wrong in the sense that some of these people really are evil. "One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" is just as simplistic and wrong as "terrorists hate our freedom". Some people consider Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, Brendan Tarrant, etc. "freedom fighters". Some of these "freedom fighters" literally strap bombs to small children and send them to troops or civilian targets to explode. e.g. Boko Haram, but Hamas has also done this (although they stopped quite a few years ago). etc. etc. I feel conferable in saying that this is evil no matter the context, and that we need to fight this. Full stop, end of story. There is lot of variety here. In the end I feel that "terrorist" is a meaningless classifier, and you need to look at the full context.

xyzzy123 3y ago
Powers will tend to declare their means of war legitimate and the means of war available to their enemies to be illegitimate. I think it's simplistic to declare our enemies "evil" because they're denied access (fortunately) to the kinds of expensive weapons systems that our own propaganda views with approval.
- arp242 3y ago
  Are you seriously saying that going to a Labour party youth camp to kill teenagers one by one to "eliminate the next generation of leftist" is somehow not evil? Or that strapping a bomb to a random kidnapped 9-year old girl is not evil? It is Evil. Full stop. No discussion. Whether someone else is also evil or not doesn't even come in to play.
  - Aloha 3y ago
    Agreed. Intentionally trying to blow up non-combatants is bad - and there is no way to make it good. Its one thing if non-combatants are collateral damage (war is dirty), its another thing entirely if ones intention is to intentionally kill civilians.
    - 3y ago

junofan 3y ago

The suitcases of cash handed to leaders are probably a bigger factor in their ignoring normal diplomatic channels.

dingnuts 3y ago

> on the other side of the coin in this case the other side of the coin is Salafists, who can rightfully go fuck themselves

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago

one of the stated reasons by Bin Laden was US military bases in that side of the world, particularly in Saudi

tehnub 3y ago

From wikipedia [0]: >Raymond Ibrahim, as a researcher at the Library of Congress, found a significant difference between Al Qaeda's messages in English directed to a Western audience and al Qaeda's Arab messages and documents directed to an Islamic audience. The Western-directed messages listed grievances as grounds for retaliation employing the "language of 'reciprocity.'" Literature for Islamic audiences contained theological motivations bereft of references to the acts of Western nations. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks#Religious_motivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_a...

Aurornis 3y ago
Why would you include only that section but omit the one above it that contains a theory that the motivations were indeed religious and intended as acts against those who don’t share their religious and cultural beliefs (aka the West and other locations with freedom of religion) > Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, in their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, argue that the 9/11 terrorist attacks are purely religious. They are seen as "a sacrament ... intended to restore to the universe a moral order that had been corrupted by the enemies of Islam." It is neither political nor strategic but an "act of redemption" meant to "humiliate and slaughter those who defied the hegemony of God."
- tehnub 3y ago
  I wonder if you misunderstood me or what I quoted. I was trying to argue against the person I replied to by showing evidence that those "grievances" aren't necessarily the true motive. If I understand your other post correctly, you agree with this.
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    The grievances (air quotes are inappropriate here) listed may not necessarily be the true motive, but they sure seem to be the true motive based on the evidence we see.
    - 3y ago

Aurornis 3y ago

This is extraordinarily reductive and unnecessarily cynical. > If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom". That was the narrative on TV nonstop A significant part of that particular brand of terrorism is indeed hostile to cultures that don’t share their religious and cultural beliefs. We can’t reduce all of their motivations to singular slogans that fit neatly into TV commercials, but it is actually true that they are aligned against a secular international order with associated freedom of religion, among many other freedoms. If you were trying to make a cheeky point about how a private entity choosing to take down Osama Bin Laden’s letter is somehow infringing on our freedoms, that’s ironic because they are a private business that is free to choose what they do and do not publish. Ironically, freedom of the press is something very much absent in regimes where these terrorists operate. > The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin Not that simple. You think Palestinians love being beholden to the terrorist leadership that refuses to allow elections, is known for stealing their humanitarian aid to enrich themselves on the order of billions of dollars, and operates safely from a foreign country?

yowzadave 3y ago
> it is actually true that they are aligned against a secular international order with associated freedom of religion, among many other freedoms Yes—there was at that time, and there remains to this day, a strong criticism of the US in that part of the world that it is a “decadent” society—which is really another way of saying that there are many freedoms that people avail themselves of that they disagree with.
kingofpandora 3y ago
> Not that simple. You think Palestinians love being beholden to the terrorist leadership that refuses to allow elections, is known for stealing their humanitarian aid to enrich themselves on the order of billions of dollars, and operates safely from a foreign country? According to large segments of the political class in the US, yes they do love it. And in fact they are legitimate targets of the Israeli military because of it.

scythe 3y ago

>If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom". The funny part is how close, and yet how far, this is to/from the truth. You know that old quip about freedom versus security? The visceral motivation for a bunch of well-educated and well-paid reactionaries (which is who they were — the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates have university degrees and grew up in nice houses) was that Americans were safe and their countrymen were not. They hated us for our security; they didn't care about freedom.

Protostome 3y ago

They consider themselves freedom fighters, because the notion of freedom is totally different for them. Freedom doesn't include being gay, a woman with actual rights, a minority that's not a muslim and so on. Moreover, their historical narrative is twisted to fit their objective - the creation of a wold-wide califate. So yes, when freedom is based and defined by this narrative, you could call them freedom fighters.

hnbad 3y ago
Sure, this describes the ideological core of Islamist groups like Al Qaeda. But this also ignores the power dynamics they exist and flourish in. The problem with "freedom fighters" is that they can be both: they can be fighting for freedom while also fighting for the right to subjugate others. The latter is often accepted if the desire for the former is strong enough. Dropping bombs on people lowers the threshold for this radicalization substantially. And if you want to be particularly uncharitable you could argue that as long as the US is not actively pivoting to isolationism (and especially so during the "world police" era until the late '00s) the US's objective was to maintain a world order with itself at the top of the hierarchy. "Liberating" other countries was historically more about making their economies accessible to US interests (and pre-collapse also shutting out the Soviet Union). I'd take US corporate privatization over the caliphate any day but that doesn't mean the former represents freedom in a way I agree with, just that it is a closer match or more compatible.
- Protostome 3y ago
  I completely agree, however, there's one thing in the core of their ideology that's different than the typical US/western european capitalism - their moral compass is absolute, derived from the Quran. It means basically, that there's very little wiggle room, you can't really negotiate with someone who believes he/she acts on orders from a divine entity. That's why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unsolved for so many years ...
  - hnbad 3y ago
    I think it's odd to suggest that the Israel-Palestine conflict is perpetuated by Islamism when Israel's own existence hinges on a moral absolute. There is a small but influential undercurrent among Israeli Zionists who believe in the creation of Greater Israel, ethnically cleansing not only all of the current borders of Israel (including Gaza and the West Bank) but also historical Transjordan and territories all the way to the Nile (i.e. all of Jordan as well as parts of Syria, Saudia Arabia and Egypt): https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions... Eliminationist rhetoric has repeatedly made its way into statements by government politicians and even programming by the Israeli national broadcaster (Kan) as in the recently broadcasted and immediately de-archived "friendship song" video: https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/national/music-video-of-israeli-children-singing-we-will-annihilate-everyone-in-gaza-shocks-world/ar-AA1kd0s5 https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/national/music-video-of-israe... The early Zionist project in Palestine was explicitly described as colonialist by key members and the expulsion of the non-Jewish Palestinian population as an explicit aspect of it. The support of Western governments including the UK pre-1945 was based more on antisemitism than genuine goodwill, ranging from the idea that having "all the Jews in one place" made them easier to handle (or eliminate - which was why the Nazi government tolerated Zionist transfers of German Jews to Palestine until WW2 shut down all emigration) to the British idea during WW2 that "giving them what they want" would give you an "in" with "the international bankers" (basically the reverse side of the Jewish conspiracy theories): https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-10-26/ty-article/the-balfour-declarations-racism-and-why-it-still-matters/0000017f-dba4-db22-a17f-ffb5fdd10000 https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-10-26/ty-article/the-ba... It's also impossible to mention the Israel-Palestine conflict itself without mentioning how Israel effectively helped bolster (Islamist) Hamas in order to combat the (secular, socialist-leaning) Fatah: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30... ... or how current PM Netanyahu supported the calls for the murder of his more moderate predecessor Rabin that preceded his assassination: https://www.timesofisrael.com/labor-chief-michaeli-rabin-was-assassinated-with-netanyahus-cooperation/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/labor-chief-michaeli-rabin-was... Heck, if you go back to the time Hamas was actually elected in Gaza (and many Gazans alive today weren't alive at the time, let alone old enough to participate in the election), their messaging was a lot more ideologically (and religously) moderate and closer to that of Fatah, even if they already were Islamists and eliminationist antisemites internally. Note that Palestinians in Gaza haven't had another election since and public opinion among Gazans seems to be very much divided. In effect, the Zionists through the creation of Israel and the domestic and military conflicts that sprang from it created a Palestinian diaspora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return) which is being mistreated in the countries it has sought refuge in. At the same time, Israel's existence in explicit opposition to its neighbors' cultures and ethnicities while in close alliance with Western powers and the US in particular is seen as a geopolitical threat by its neighbors and especially those countries that are aligned opposite to the US - this more than any religious motivations seems the main motivation behind Iran's support of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Islamism definitely plays a part in this and Islamists do lend themselves more towards carrying out the terrorist attacks and missile strikes against Israel as none of its neighbors could risk an all-out war even without direct involvement of the US military. But as always in geopolitics it runs much deeper than one group's religious dogma. And I haven't even mentioned how certain Evangelical Christians shaped US politics on Israel because the reestablishment of Israel as a "Jewish state" (and the extermination of those same Jews) is an integral part of their mythology of the "end times" (and salvation). There are very unhealthy beliefs about Israel/Palestine present in all three Abrahamic religions, to say the least.

simonsarris 3y ago

> If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom" The letter very clearly states that they don't like freedom! It very specifically calls out permissiveness of sex, gays, banking (as every western nation sees it, contra Islamic banking), gambling, alcohol, and separation of church and state as evils: > (a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest. > (b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind: > (i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. > (iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object. Mad we didn't behead old Bill: > Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

93po 3y ago
It’s funny how it’s okay to call those things evil if you’re a conservative Christian group but we cling onto the same words as one of the justifications to kill and attack another group
- not_the_fda 3y ago
  In some circles they are called Y'all Qaeda
  - sshine 3y ago
    I guess the similarity falls short of justifying bombing civilians in another country... oh, wait.