How the master mujahid exploits Western media dhimmitude. From The Australian, with thanks to JE:
OSAMA bin Laden watches Larry King.
It may seem a rather trite observation considering the numbing frothiness of King’s CNN talk show compared with the gravity of all that surrounds the world’s most hunted terrorist.
But it may reveal much about the role al-Qa’ida’s leader sees the Western media playing in his bloody war against the infidel.
In a new book by terrorism expert Peter Bergen, there is a passage in which Hamid Mir, bin Laden’s Pakistani biographer, recalls seeing the September 11 mastermind, in his hideaway, glued to CNN.
“When I met him after 9/11, he said: ‘I was watching you on the Larry King show a few days ago, and you told Larry King that when Osama bin Laden talks on religion, he is not convincing, but when he talks on politics, he is very much convincing. So today I will convince you on some religious issues’,” Mir tells Bergen.
“So I said, ‘OK, you watched the Larry King show?’.
“He said, ‘Yes, I am fighting a big war, and I have to monitor the activities of my enemy through these TV channels’.”
Remember, it was the CNN pictures of the corpses of US troops being brutally dragged through the streets of Mogadishu – and the subsequent retreat ordered by then president Bill Clinton – that gave bin Laden the belief that the US did not have the stomach for war.
And so when bin Laden speaks, like any media-savvy politician with an agenda, it is worth examining what might lie beyond his words.
Read it all.