"Pull Up Your Pant Legs For Jihad"

Having just read the entire transcipt of bin-Laden's taped broadcast, I thought I'd leave you with a few of the more salacious quotes along with some additional comments:

"We need to reassure while we are close to the unjust war, the war of the bawds, America is leading with its allies and agents on a number of important lessons"

I couldn't tell if this "war of the bawds" was some sort of hip-hop translating neologism or an accurate bending of words. As it turns out, a bawd is either a prostitute or a brothel owner, from the Old French baude-strote, or "procurer of prostitutes". I wonder if he had in mind Miss Mona Stangley from The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas or if he was speaking more generally. Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing a war of bawds. Bawds in bikinis, wrestling in mud, like in those Miller Light commercials.

"Second, remember that victory comes only from God. We have to exert all efforts with preparations, stimulation, and jihad. God said, 'O believers, if you fight for the sake of God, God will grant you victory and make your standing firm."

When I read this, I realized that in many ways, Osama is little more than a cheap plagiarist. He must have seen President Bush's State of the Union speech which closed with:

"We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving god behind all of life and all of history. May he guide us now, and may God continue to bless the United States of America."

With everyone resting their fate in gods and higher powers and Providence, why are we even bothering with a military campaign against each other? God could just be sitting up there, rolling the dice in a cosmic game of Risk with St. Peter. Which reminds me of a great St. Peter joke I read the other day courtesy of Just Joking:

A guy arrives at the pearly gates, waiting to be admitted. St. Peter is leafing through the Big Book to see if the guy is worthy of entering. After several minutes, St. Peter closes the book, furrows his brow, and says, "I don''t really see that you ever really did anything great in your life, but I don''t see anything really bad either. Tell you what," St. Peter says. "If you can tell me of one REALLY good deed that you did in your life, I''ll let you in."

The guy thinks for a moment and says, "OK, well there was this one time when I was driving down the highway and I saw a gang assaulting this poor girl. I slowed down, and sure enough, there they were, about 50 of 'em torturing this woman. Infuriated, I got out my car, grabbed a tire iron out of my trunk, as the gang members formed a circle around me. One of the first guys in the gang was a huge guy with a studded leather jacket and a chain running from his nose to his ear. So, I ripped his chain out of his face and smashed him and then walked straight up to the leader of the gang. As I walked up to the leader, I hit him over the head with the tire iron. Then I turned around and yelled to the rest of them, ''Leave this poor, innocent girl alone! You're all a bunch of sick, deranged animals! Go home before I really teach you all a lesson in pain!"

St. Peter, duly impressed, says "Wow! When did this happen?"

"About ten minutes ago."

(We now return to the Osama speech, already in progress...)

"The Prophet said, 'Avoid falling in the seven great sins, which are: believing in any but God, magic, murder, usury, stealing orphans' money, fleeing from battle, slandering believing women ... besides, drinking alcohol, adultery, not obeying the parents, and false testimony.' You should be obedient in general."

I've got a few questions about these seven great sins. First of all, what is this business about stealing orphans' money? Orphans don't have money. If they did, they wouldn't be orphans, would they? And while these seven great sins he lists do indeed add up to seven sins, what's this business about tossing in the "drinking alchohol, adultery, not obeying parents and false testimony?" Are these sins too? If so, then wouldn't that be 11 sins, not 7? Or perhaps they are sub-clauses or appendices to the original sins. It just isn't clear. And I'm also not clear about "not obeying the parents". Does this mean EVER or just between certain impressionable ages? What if you are an orphan? Are you exempt, since you don't have any parents to disobey?

"They (American soldiers) are fighting only to serve the interest of those who have the capital, arms dealers, oil owners, including the criminal gang in the White House. Adding to that, those who keep their personal envoys, Bush the father."

More plagiarism from Osama. This sounds distinctly like the sort of No Blood For Oil arguments everyone else excluding the Bush Administration and its drooling pack of rabid sycophants is making. Can't Osama come up with some sort of original depictions of the motivations of the Bush Administration, something of his own authorship? Whatever happened to that simple war against the Great Satan? Speaking of which, to veer slightly off track for a moment, in case you hadn't heard, the Hajj pilgrims have just said no to Satan AND America. How did they find time to pray? Where does this leave The Great Satan Quarterly for Hajj pilgrim subscribers?

Osama also settles into the grandpa-by-the-fire story-telling mode when he goes into his tale of surviving the bombing in Afghanistan and asks that great rhetorical question:

"If all the evil global powers were not capable of defeating one simple mile occupied by mujahedeen using very poor equipment, how can such evil powers triumph over the Islamic world?"

I'll defer that question to Captain Fantastic, Donald Rumsfeld, who held a press conference of his own today:

"There have been people on the FBI's "10 Most Wanted" for decades. There have been people all over the globe that -- a manhunt is a manhunt. It's a big world. People can hide. And the question isn't, do you find him immediately? The question is, are you putting sufficient pressure that it makes it difficult for the terrorist acts to occur?"

Hmmm. Sounds like he doesn't know either.

And in what should be a blow to the al Qaeda-Saddam connection theorists for any rational thinking people left in the Administration, Osama says clearly:

"You know that such a crusade war concerns the Muslim nation mainly, regardless of whether the socialist party and Saddam remain or go."

Sounds like Osama cares about Saddam about as much as old Rummy does about the French and Germans.

Lastly, I'll leave you with my favorite line from Osama's broadcast, the one that finally shows some originality:

"So Muslims in general and Iraq in particular must pull up your pant legs for jihad against this unjust campaign."

I just can't help but wonder if this isn't just a plug for his brother Yeslam Binladin's Bin Ladin fashion line, which was to be moderately priced and designed to compete with the likes of Italian retailer Benetton SpA. It's getting so you can't tell the shills from the real jihadists anymore.