Text 17562, 85 rader
Skriven 2006-01-25 14:45:22 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Pipes on Blum
=====================
From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at:
www.danielpipes.org/article/3308
[William Blum and] Al-Qaeda's Leftist Brigade

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
January 24, 2006

[The NY Sun text differs in many small ways from the following.]

William Blum, a Washington, D.C. writer, responded delightedly last Thursday on
learning that Osama bin Laden had cited his book in an audiotape. Blum called
the mention of Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower "almost as
good as being an Oprah book," a reference to the popular American television
host whose endorsement routinely makes a book a bestseller.

Asked if he was queasy about bin Laden's urging listeners to read his book,
Blum replied: "I'm not repulsed, and I'm not going to pretend I am." Quite the
contrary, he said: "I'm glad. ? It's good publicity for my book." And, indeed,
it was: Thanks to bin Laden's promotion, Rogue State ascended from 205,763 to
26 on Amazon.com's ranking of most-ordered books.

Blum explained his response by saying he found bin Laden no worse than the U.S.
government: "I would not say that bin Laden has been any less moral than
Washington has been." He even refused to distance himself from bin Laden's
views: "If he shares with me a deep dislike for certain aspects of U.S. foreign
policy, then I'm not going to spurn any endorsement of the book by him. I think
it's good that he shares those views."

Blum describes his life mission as "slowing down the American Empire, ?
injuring the beast." Not surprisingly, Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal,
and their ilk have lavished praise on his work.

What attracted bin Laden to Blum? This passage (which actually comes from
another of Blum's books, titled Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the
American Empire): "If I were the [U.S.] president, I could stop terrorist
attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first
apologize-very publicly and very sincerely-to all the widows and orphans, the
impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of
American imperialism."

Until his sudden catapult into the public eye, Blum, 72, had lived the quiet
life of a second-string America-hater. The child of Polish Jewish immigrants,
he grew up in Brooklyn, studied accounting in college, and, as an
anti-communist with aspirations to become a foreign service officer, he went to
work at a computer-related position in the U.S. Department of State in the
mid-1960s. The Vietnam War radicalized him and he resigned from State in 1967
to pursue a career of far-left advocacy and sabotage (he claims to have
revealed the names and addresses of over two hundred CIA operatives). For
nearly forty years, Blum has written op-eds after articles after books pursuing
his hobbyhorse to prove the alleged evil of the U.S. government officials, whom
he has compared to "chainsaw baby killers."

He goes so far as to state the existence of an American-sponsored "holocaust"
since 1945 that has caused the death of a few million people and condemned many
more millions to "lives of misery and torture." David Horowitz, a foremost
analyst of the left, sums up this line of thought in his excellent study,
Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery): for Blum,
"America is worse than Nazi Germany." Horowitz also notes that "there is no
discernible difference" between Blum's view of the U.S. role in the Cold War
and the crudest Communist caricature manufactured in the Kremlin.

Although Blum was childishly delighted by his sudden celebrity and riches, his
comrades on the far left reacted more warily to bin Laden's endorsement, aware
how it reveals that, as Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media puts it, "bin Laden
is counting on a [leftist] fifth column in the U.S. to undermine the war on
terrorism and hand him a victory on the battlefield."

Such exposure so worries some on the far left that they have gone so far as to
portray the bin Laden audiotape to be "an obvious fake" concocted by
neo-conservatives in the U.S. government. But elaborate conspiracy theories
cannot undo the fact that the Islamist-leftist alliance, burgeoning for years,
has now reached the point that the far left constitutes Al-Qaeda's new
mujahideen.

After having failed to mount a massive terrorist operation in the United States
in over four years, bin Laden's early but very public Valentine to the far left
suggests that he sees it as a critical ally. And he is entirely correct to do
so.

From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at:
www.danielpipes.org/article/3308

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