Reply #5: It isn't just how obssessed OBL is with palestine/israel that matters

[kenny blankenship]

OBL is the nutcase fringe even among his own class of extremists. What matters more is that the brutal mistreatment of the Palestinians, and the US Gov.'s tolerance and support of it, continually reminds Arabs and Muslims everywhere of their age-old grievances against the West.

OBL may want to see God's Justice poured out on the decadent West, but he wouldn't have a MOVEMENT of others to command if it were not for the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people. Add to that the constant jealous intervention in Arab affairs that the American power elite feel is justified by our need for their oil and you have a recipe for a longterm reign of retaliatory terror. Al-Q* has to recruit people who don't already believe the central dogmas of Islamic Revolution. Bush and his policies of driving the Western presence into Islam at gunpoint and of supporting Israel up to the brink of genocide are like the answer to OBL's prayers.

America--and its media in particular--has had less intention of even looking in the direction of the real sources of terrorism, than it had to examine the wisdom of gas guzzling vehicles and its energy wasting patterns of post-urban development during the 1980s and 1990s. The denial and the death just keep mounting. Deep down in its secret heart America seems to be echo the rationale of MacBeth: "I am in blood, stepped in so far that returning were as tedious as go o'er." Blood will have blood is the fate we have chosen pretending neurotically that no other outcome was ever possible.