Osama Bin Laden is too hot for Khartoum. And Ramallah. And Beijing. And Canberra.
The CS Monitor reports (warning! meta-meta-journalism alert!) on news stories from all over, in the wake of Bin Laden's taped message globalizing the Jihad.
Hamas says Bin Laden has "different opinions". An Aussie journalist calls Bin Laden and his ilk "boring" (and notes that sometimes "different" means "the same"). Sudan says Bin Laden is a terrorist - not that there's anything wrong with that. China's UN ambassador capped the insulting day of news for Osama by characterizing him as "always, always negative".
The serious news here is that even other militant Islamists find Osama an unwelcome fellow-traveler. The U.S. has made it sufficiently clear that harboring al-Qaeda can lead to very bad consequences, and the Bush Doctrine is forcing even those who openly hate America to publically eschew an endorsement from the big O. And this is, I think, more than English-language PR. Seeing the influx of unaccountable Saudis into Iraq, other Arab countries would rather be left to fight their own battles against the infidel their own way. Another angle is that Hamas and Sudan's regime each have a lot to lose by further destabilizing their respective situations, and it's hard for even them to believe that al-Qaeda's insinuation would do anything but.
1 comment:
apologies for the grammar in the last sentence. As my father says, ending a sentence in a preposition is an abuse of grammar up with which I will not put!
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