Oct 2, 2009
Week of September 28, 2009
Juan Cole
Usama Bin Laden's latest screed on the Western evacutation from Afghanistan is the height of hypocrisy, since Bin Laden actively connived at getting Western troops to go there. Abdel Bar Atwan is a prominent Arab journalist and intellectual. Here what he said about his meeting with Bin Laden in 1996:"Osama Bin Laden told me when I interviewed him in November 1996, 'I can’t fight the Americans on the American mainland. It is too far. But if I succeed in bringing the Americans where I can find them, where I can fight them on my own terms, on my turf, on my own ground, this will be the greatest success.'"
I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination... Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.
The lowest circle of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy [former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer] is disloyal and the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies. Maybe Scott McClellan will chew on this guy's leg in the after life. So creepy and so disgusting.