• AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Afghanistan, Palestine, US bases in Arab lands and cruel and crippling sanctions against Iraq:

      https://www.newsweek.com/osama-bin-laden-911-letter-transcript-12427271

      “The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq,” bin Laden wrote. “This is why the American people cannot be innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.”

      If you strip out the religious speech from the declaration their reasons for doing this are pretty “rational”. The religion is mostly the ideological bond between different peoples. Besides some very problematic religious repression.

      If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice … then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.

      The larger strategy was pretty clear, draw the US into unsustainable wars that shorten their “unipolar moment” of being the only global superpower.

      • Freeposity@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        You mean they didn’t “hate us for our freedoms” like the Dubya administration kept telling us?

        I wonder how many people who actually thought about that line for half a minute still thought it was accurate.

        • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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          4 hours ago

          I mean they do hate the “obscenities” in the west which I guess they mean gays and whatnot. But so do the christofascists that were hiding behind Bush. And it’s not what really drives them, it’s like just one paragraph. They wouldn’t actually go to war for something like this.

      • IAmYouButYouDontKnowYet@reddthat.com
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        2 days ago

        westure culture is built on a fake foundation that requires constant patching, manipulation, and war to keep functional. It’s an insane concept. Instead of living with the universe and nature, we actively created our own system that nature and the universe is constantly breaking down. We live against the grain of universal growth.

        Native cultures warned us, Islam warns us (not western Islam), nature warns us…

    • vzqq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      At the time, they made a big hullabaloo about the U.S. stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, the country of the holiest sites, during and after desert shield/storm.

      I honestly don’t know what is a sincerely held belief and what is pretextual.