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Question:

> [snip] > >Even with an indictment for his > >previous attacks, testimony against him, tapes he has made, his money ties, > >and his public statements, many Muslims still think Bin Laden should not be > >suspect. > No, it’s just that you people trust your governments and take any weak > evidence which has been repeatedly criticised as assumptions, and conjecture. > Don’t be stupid, Sammy boy. The evidence against bin Laden is > overwhelming.

The evidence itself is overwhelmingly insufficient.   The only effective counter to this is to actually show the evidence. > Nobody who has read it has seriously questioned a single > iota of it.

And how many people have actually read it?   All I see are reports of people reputed to have read it.  People that have a substantial stake in having us believe Osama is guilty but not enough of a stake to actually show us the evidence.   People who would be embarassed if the evidence they were hoarding was shown to be, shall we say, inadequate? > Furthermore, bin Laden has now admitted he did it.

No he hasn’t.  HMG says that he admits it on a video that has been circulating among al Qaida for what must now be 3 weeks.  A video that they gave excerpts of which none are an admission.   A video that they refuse to release the whole transcript of even though al Qaida presumably knows what is on it (it is their tape). One of the precepts when you try to balance the needs of secrecy with the need to have the trust of the people and soldiers is to not keep secret what the enemy already knows.   Keeping the transcript of the video secret is simply stupid no matter how you try to spin the message. > It’s an > open and shut case; a done deal.

No its not. > We got the bastard bang to rights.

You got the guns dude.  *bang* to rights is more like it. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> …

Response:

[snip] >Even with an indictment for his >previous attacks, testimony against him, tapes he has made, his money ties, >and his public statements, many Muslims still think Bin Laden should not be >suspect. > No, it’s just that you people trust your governments and take any weak > evidence which has been repeatedly criticised as assumptions, and conjecture.

Don’t be stupid, Sammy boy. The evidence against bin Laden is overwhelming. Nobody who has read it has seriously questioned a single iota of it. Furthermore, bin Laden has now admitted he did it. It’s an open and shut case; a done deal. We got the bastard bang to rights. And besides, the campaign to capture or kill him isn’t to punish him for what he’s done, it’s to prevent him from doing it again. Two more points: many Muslims *do* say they know he is guilty; many more know he is guilty but are reluctant to say so publicly, because they come under so much pressure from their ignorant religious leaders. Immediately after the bombing of the Taliban started there was a brief kerfuffle in Pakistan and elsewhere, but once the evidence against bin Laden got round the world (I think the west may have been a tad impatient about that – not everyone watches the western media); once they understood that their president knew it was true, it soon began to die down. That’s not to say there aren’t millions of Muslims out there who *still* won’t admit to the truth. But there’s an interesting phenomenon here. All the hijackers, most of al-Qaeda, Osama himself and most of his 055 Brigade ‘fighters’ who look after him in Afghanistan, and the religious ‘authorities’ in New York, London and Paris who preach hatred of the west, are Arabs. Also, the Taliban, the ethnic group in Afghanistan from which some of them come, the Pakistanis who rioted on their behalf and who support them in the border areas, their supporters in Britain and the Imans who encourage rioting and arson in the north of England on their behalf, are all Pushtuns (in England three-quarters of them can’t even speak English!). You, Samata, I’ll hazard a guess, are a Pushtun. Abdul Aziz, I’ll hazard another guess, is an Arab. Or else either of you are one or the other, and so are most of the other Islamic fundamentalists on these newsgroups. Without wanting to make this into purely an ethnic issue, it’s clear that, as one of the most expansionist and even imperialist peoples in history (and, it should be said, with a once-great culture), the Arabs in the middle east often feel particularly humiliated by western power and western freedom. All of the Arabs involved in 11/9, including Osama himself, were westernised. There is now a well known phenomenon of Arabs from strict religious upbringings going to study in the west and finding it such a culture shock, and being filled with such resentment, envy and fear on their return home, they are almost consumed with hatred. Osama is one such person. Likewise, the Pushtuns are the dominant, and most warlike, ethnic group in the entire southern Asian region west of the Indian peninsula. They were the one western group who were against the partition of India – despite being Muslims they actually took the Indian side of the argument, against Jinnah, on the grounds that an independent Pakistan would destroy their hopes of a seperate homeland. Their big problem is that when the British invented the northern border of the then Indian Empire it divided their homeland in two – now half the Pushtuns live in Pakistan and half in Afghanistan. The Taliban, like most of the Imans in England, come from madrassahs in the Pakistan half: they are ultra-conservative and fundamentalist, often from rural areas of Pakistan, with little knowledge of the relatively sophisticated life of the Pakistani cities (let alone British ones). They are, in short, ignorant. This is the background to our present troubles: ethnic rivalry. You only have to look at Turkey or Iran, both of whom have been happy to help the west. The people who comprise the Northern Alliance are Uzbeks and Tajiks. Uzbeks are ethnic Turks, Tajiks are ethnic Iranians (only Sunni, not Shia Muslims). The unaligned Hezara people are related to the Muslims of western China, only they are Shi’ites not Sunnis, and thus closer to Iran. Which shows that Islam does play its part in all this, especially in terms of cultural allegiance. Nevertheless the underlying force – the reason the NA have such hatred for Pakistan (meaning the Pakistani Pushtuns), and southern and northern Afghanistan are at such loggerheads, is simple ethnic and cultural difference, just as we’ve seen in Europe for millenia. It surely includes opposing interpretations of Islam – Turkish society has traditionally been more liberal than some other Muslim societies – but any attempt to impose a single interpretation, as the Taliban sought to do, over Afhghanistan was always doomed for the simple reason that the Taliban were foreigners. All the US allies did was hasten their demise. So don’t feel too bad Sammy boy. It was always going to turn to shit. The interesting part is why so many British Muslim fundies don’t see this as an ethnic dispute; why they insist on seeing it as the ‘promised’ holy caliphate once again being destroyed by the perfidious western infidels. It goes to show how much they’ve lost touch with the people so revere (yes you, Abdul). They’re as ‘decadent’ as the rest of us.

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