What really kills me is that the rhetoric is all wrong. Every thing else I have ever heard from OBL, has been in a very sterotyped rhetorical pattern.

I hope that somebody can riddle who put this scam together and why. I am thinking some Euroleftists, but I made that up.

Bob.

OBL: “Kerry for President”

That evil Karl Rove has managed to get two AQ videotapes released within a week of the election saying “We want Kerry, he’ll be more sensitive in the fight against terror”

All the world’s leading terrorists now support Kerry, what a testimonial!

I believe that W will insist that the attack not begin until after the polls close Tuesday. It would a be a nice gesture of respect to our Marines who deserve a battle free of political taint. Maybe it will give time for some of those French Arabs that Catherine mentions to get inside Fallujah. I hope that if they do they are carrying good ID so that their families can be notified.

Catherine,

Your acquaintance was referring to Hama where Daddy Assad made an example of the Muslim Brotherhood. King Hussein of Jordan also had a great number of Palestinians killed in September of 1970 while driving the PLO from Jordan.

It’s one of those quaint Arab customs that we will see enacted again in Iraq once the elections are held. Whatever remains of Fallujah after the Marines are done is going to be smashed even flatter by the Iraqis later. You can sort of count on a massacre of the al Tikriti tribe too. Again, it’s just one of those customs that we must all embrace if we are to truly celebrate cultural diversity.

I hope we get to a reality based reality sometime soon.

LOL!

Another keeper.

Another factoid.

The speaker last night (have to look up his name) said that French authorities believe that 10% of France’s Muslim population (5 million altogether? I think?) are potentially recruitable to radical Islam. Some are going to Iraq.

I’m too tired to wade through the transcript, but from what I’ve read so far he is channeling Michael Moore.

Goats?

Voting fraud in Florida?

Hello?

This sounds nothing like Bin Laden, nothing like Salafi Islam, nothing like anything I’ve come to know about radical Islam in the past three years, and I don’t think I’m hallucinating.

I mentioned that I met last night an expert on sharia law. It turns out he is also an expert on radical Islam. He studies it “undercover,” and I mean seriously undercover. Horrifying.

I mentioned also that he violently opposed & opposes the War in Iraq.

I bring him up again because of UBL’s harping on freedom.

Undercover-guy spent quite awhile explaining to me that freedom is not an important value for Muslims. Freedom is an actively bad value, as a matter of fact, because freedom means the freedom not to be Muslim. “Freedom means your daughter is free to have sex with lots of men,” he said.

My husband asked whether he meant that within Muslim culture freedom is the same thing as license, and he said yes.

Freedom also, originally, simply meant “not enslaved.” Slavery in Islamic culture doesn’t have the same meaning it does in Western culture, where philosophers argued that to be enslaved meant to have one’s self crushed. I’ve semi-forgotten this part now, but, roughly, we have a philosophical tradition of arguing that a slave has been stripped of humanity, personhood, selfhood, etc.

That is not the case within Islamic culture, where slavery wasn’t considered a horrific thing, and where anyone who got conquered in battle then became a slave. It was a normal status, I gather. The guy said that back when slavery was a norm it was considered better not to be a slave, but not vastly better. Saying someone was free or enslaved was descriptive, not so different from saying someone was tall or short.

The ultimate value within Muslim culture, he said, is justice, not freedom. I believe that, partly because we have a similar dichotomy in the West, with a tension between freedom and equality. Republicans favor freedom over equality; Democrats favor equality over freedom.

Justice means leading an Islamic life in accordance with Islamic law.

I bring all this up because I believe him: you never, ever, ever read or hear Islamists yammering on about freedom.

We are the folks who yammer on about freedom.

They are the folks who yammer on about surrendering to the will of Allah.

Let’s try and keep the players straight.

Nothing about this tape adds up, unless Bin Laden has actually lost his mind due to Unremitting Stress, which was the first thing that occurred to me when I skimmed the transcript.

OTOH, the second thing that occured to me also has to do with last night.

The undercover-guy, whose first language is Arabic & who grew up in the ME but is an American citizen, sounded exactly like every other liberal Bush-hating professor at the table, which was everyone at the table except for me and the two French guests.

So they were all going on and on about the lying Democrats and the horrors of Wolfowitz and the low IQ of the president (I must say that my husband ditched the low-IQ business awhile back) with me interjecting the occasional, “Oh, come on!”

Everyone was in full agreement that “imposing” freedom on the ME is the worst possible thing a country could undertake to do; imposing freedom & democracy is just wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong the whole concept is practically a crime against humanity.

So in the middle of all this, with everyone nodding and agreeing and furthermoring, suddenly undercover-guy says, “Americans don’t have the will. We don’t have what it takes to bring democracy to Iraq. We need to lose 100,000 soldiers, and kill 1,000,000 Iraqis. That’s what it would take. Then we could do it; then I’d support the war.”

For the liberal professors, that was a conversation-stopper.

Not me. I’d just spent three years fighting with my husband over the strong horse/weak horse business; this wasn’t the first time it had crossed my mind you might need to dispatch a million Iraqis to settle things down over there.

I said, “If we lost 100,000 soldiers and killed 1,000,000 Iraqis and installed democracy, then democracy would be a good thing?”

“Of course!” he said impatiently, as if the rest of us just didn’t get it.

Then he told a story about Syria suppressing an uprising by slaughtering every single human being inside a city of 30,000 people. “That was the end of it,” he said. “No more problem. That’s what you have to do.”

So today my husband and I were trying to figure out if the guy had radically contradicted himself, or if there’s some angle of vision from which freedom-is-bad and democracy-in-Iraq-would-be-good-if-you-killed-1,000,000-people-first are consistent positions.

Maybe there is, but it did strike me that we’d witnessed a simple case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The guy had been humming along in his liberal-college-professor mode and we hit some invisible trip wire and his born-and-raised-in-Lebanon doppelganger just popped out. (Which is good, because now I don’t have to worry he’s gonna get beheaded in his chosen line of work.)

Maybe it’s the same thing with Bin Laden. UBL was educated in the West; at a minimum he’s familiar with our tropes. Maybe he has a Western Michael Moore self coexisting with his Muslim UBL self.

I have trouble imagining how this plays out.

If UBL’s whole shtick is: I’m a left liberal Democrat, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore, how scary is that?

Not very.

The real October Surprise will be an attack on Fallujah.

We’ve been reading about “preparations” for weeks. Something tells me we’re just about done with the “preparations” now.

Let’s see what effect a Sixty Minutes story will have while video of helicopter gunships blazes on all the other channels.

Last Friday night, if I had speculated that the last week of the election would feature an al Qaqaa Times/SeeBS mockudrama concerning the “possible disappearance” of .01% of Saddam’s conventional weaponry followed by ABC’s playing of a tape of Ass am the American terrorist’s threats against his birth country immediately followed by a good OBL imitator reading a script by Ass am based upon some of the more stupid parts of ‘Leni’ Moore’s crockumentary, I believe that people here would have looked with skepticism upon any further posts that I made.

I don’t think our host could peddle the previous to a studio. I don’t think that he would consider trying to peddle it.

I hope we get to a reality based reality sometime soon.