JawsBlog

MEMRI has just released it’s analysis of Osama Bin Laden’s latest video tape. Go read it here.

Suprisingly, enough MEMRI says one of the same things that I did, most noteably this:

Another conspicuous aspect of the tape is the absence of common Islamist themes that are relevant to the month of Ramadan, which for fundamentalists like bin Laden is the month of Jihad and martyrdom

Okay, so enough gloating on my part…let’s move on…

Going over MEMRI’s analysis, it apears as if Bin Laden has channeled more of Michael Moore’s rhetoric… According to MEMRI, the US Press has (not suprisingly) mistranslated a key word in the video:

The Islamist website Al-Qal’a explained what this sentence meant: “This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, ‘Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,’ it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn’t treat all American people as if they’re the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections.”

Now, let’s see what Moore said on September 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….[Emphasis Mine

(Quote copied from this post on an unrelated topic on another blog–but a post worth reading).

Now is it just me, or does Moore’s quote about the murder of people from “blue states” sound a lot like Bin Laden’s offer of an “olive branch” to states that go blue this fall….

Anyone else see the connection???