THE SHOCKING TRUTH about Osama bin Laden, writes Brendan O'Neill at Reason, is that he reads our blogs:

Bin Laden’s parasitical relationship with Western debate really came into its own from 2004 onward. During this period he has sounded almost indistinguishable from various left-wing blogs. In April 2004 he ranted about “big media,” describing them as “agents of deception and exploitation.” He said the war in Iraq “is making billions of dollars for the big corporations, whether it be those who manufacture weapons or reconstruction firms like Halliburton and its offshoot sister companies.” (Halliburton is, of course, the bête noir of anti-war bloggers.)

Bin Laden also said, “It is all too clear, then, who benefits most from stirring up this war and bloodshed: the merchants of war who direct world policy from behind the scenes.” This is also a popular idea in the blogosphere: that a wicked cabal led by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney (both of whom have big business links) is leading America to war. In his latest statement bin Laden spells out who these “merchants of war” are, describing Iraq as “the ill-omened plan of the four—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.” He has also adopted the “war for oil” argument of various anti-war bloggers, arguing that the “black gold blinded” Bush.

Bin Laden frequently drops the names of the anti-war blogosphere’s favorite authors and activists. In October 2004 he advised the White House to read “Robert Fisk, who is a fellow [Westerner] and a co-religionist of yours, but one whom I consider unbiased.” In the same statement bin Laden chastised Bush for leaving “50,000 of his citizens in the two towers” because he considered “a little girl’s story about a goat and its butting [to be] more important than dealing with airplanes and their butting into skyscrapers.” This reads like a reference to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens with footage of Bush reading The Pet Goat to a classroom of children on the morning of 9/11. Did bin Laden watch a pirate DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11? Or did he read about the Pet Goat incident on the Web, where images of Bush’s uncomfortable classroom performance were widely available even before Moore’s film was released?

Now he has suggested that Bush and company read William Blum’s Rogue State. Funny how this Islamist warrior never recommends that we read the Koran.

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