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Binladen remains a scapegoat LA TIMES 9/11 - Islamic Fundamentalist Strangles Puppy
In such an environment, the release by Al Jazeera this week of new tapes that include some of the Sept. 11 hijackers, a claim of responsibility for the attacks and a voice that the broadcaster says is Bin Laden's would appear unlikely to change many minds. The phenomenon is too complex for that.
"No one else could have the sophistication to do it," she said.
While many fundamentalists in Egypt do tend to credit Bin Laden with instigating the attack, mainstream opinion does not.
"Perhaps the wildest explanation that spread through the Muslim world in the days after the attacks was that they had been the work of Israeli intelligence, which had managed to secretly warn 4,000 Jews to stay home from work on Sept. 11."
http://www.latimes.com/news/specials/911/la-fg-osama11sep11.story
For Many Muslims, Bin Laden Remains a Scapegoat of U.S.
By TYLER MARSHALL and MICHAEL SLACKMAN
TIMES STAFF WRITERS
September 11 2002
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Few people in the Muslim world have more reason to share America's conviction that Osama bin Laden masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States than Egyptian journalist Sakina Sadat.
Her brother, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by Islamic extremists 21 years ago. Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman Zawahiri, was a member of the organization that killed him. Sadat has an American son-in-law, a daughter who lives in Los Angeles, a pragmatic mind and a worldly outlook.
She also believes that Bin Laden had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks.
"He's a killer who wants to rule the Islamic world, but he doesn't have the mind to do this," she said. "He can send people with machine guns to kill, to destroy, to burn, but not to direct these three airplanes with pilots to destroy those buildings with a precision that requires milliseconds."
Much as the O.J. Simpson trial exposed the divide that separated white and black Americans in the mid-1990s, the accusations against Bin Laden bring sharply divergent views of the world into focus. For most Americans, and many of their allies, there is little doubt of Bin Laden's guilt. But from much of the Muslim world, the U.S. campaign against him often seems vengeful and anti-Islamic.
The differences reflect an enormous gulf of suspicion between the United States and Muslim societies, even at the upper echelons. Those who have followed his actions say that's exactly what Bin Laden had in mind.
"The implications are serious," said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a respected political scientist at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, and one of the few interviewed for this article who believes that Bin Laden did, in fact, mastermind the Sept. 11 attacks. "His agenda is to damage relations between Islam and the West, and he has succeeded in ways few really understand."
Analysts, both in the West and in Islamic countries, suggest that America's inability to convince Muslims of Bin Laden's guilt has helped sustain sympathy for him and may even have helped keep the Al Qaeda terrorist network from disintegrating under the force of relentless U.S. military pressure.
"No terrorist group in history has taken the pounding that Al Qaeda has, but it still operates," noted Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist at the Rand Corp.'s Washington office. "It still circulates videos for recruiting, provides film to [Arab TV network] Al Jazeera and invites people to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The sympathy they get matters."
The sharply differing assessments of Bin Laden's involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks are also likely to complicate efforts to build new bridges across the cultural divide.
The belief in Bin Laden's innocence extends far beyond the working-class slums and fundamentalist mosques that serve as some of radical Islam's prime recruiting areas. It is also found in the quiet parlors of educated, intellectual elites—from Cairo and Islamabad to Kuala Lumpur.
"Many of us--including me--were perturbed and perplexed that, within hours [of the attacks], the blame was put on Osama bin Laden," Malaysian social scientist Chandra Muzaffar said in an interview. "The evidence available is not persuasive enough to convince people. That leads us to believe there's something else here."
It is unclear just how and why opinions over Bin Laden's complicity are so divergent and remain so deeply rooted, but there are several theories.
Hoffman said many extremist groups in the Muslim world now operate well-oiled propaganda machines. He cited Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which he said operates its own TV network as well as Web sites in French, English and Arabic. In Bin Laden's own Al Qaeda, one of the four main committees is devoted to communications, Hoffman said.
The State Department gradually scaled back its own propaganda arm, the United States Information Service, after the end of the Cold War. As a result, Hoffman said, the U.S. is now outgunned in the battle for public opinion in the Muslim world.
"They've elbowed their way into the sweet spot, and we're playing catch-up," he said. "The message of these militant groups is simple and repetitive, and there's nothing to do to defend against it."
But other factors are at work too.
America's overall dearth of credibility in the Muslim world, in part a result of its support of Israel, and the swiftness with which Bin Laden was identified as the main suspect sowed doubt among many.
Many in Muslim countries also find it hard to understand how the most technologically advanced nation in the world could fail to react while such an attack unfolded over a period of more than two hours. Some have concluded that, much like the Oklahoma City bombing six years earlier, the attacks on New York and Washington were carried out by Americans.
The events of Sept. 11 are also perceived in Muslim nations through the prism of deep feelings that long ago shaped people's view of themselves and the world.
"It's a mixture of inferiority, people saying: 'We Arabs can't do it. We are so weak, we are so ignorant,' " said Abdul Moneim Said, director of the Cairo-based Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a government-funded think tank. "Others say we are so superior that our religion doesn't allow us to do this ... to kill people.
"You get it from both sides," he said.
Edward S. Walker Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates and currently president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, observed: "Nobody likes to admit your religion is capable of that kind of atrocity. There is abhorrence and denial."
Walker also notes something else at play: a sense in many parts of the Muslim world that the Bush administration's decision to identify Bin Laden so quickly was one more example of a powerful anti-Islamic prejudice.
He illustrated this mind-set with a joke making the rounds in Cairo: A young man, after jumping out of a crowd in New York City to rescue a child being mauled by a dog, is told by a reporter that he will be described as a hero in the next day's paper.
"The headline will read, 'New York Man Saves Boy,' " the reporter says, only to be informed that the man is not from New York. "Then it will read, 'American Hero Saves Boy,' " the journalist goes on, but he is again corrected. The hero, he is told, is from Pakistan. That results in a different kind of headline: "Islamic Fundamentalist Strangles Puppy."
Even evidence accepted in the West as unassailable proof of Bin Laden's complicity is viewed skeptically. For example, videotape of Bin Laden discussing his involvement in the attacks has been rejected as suspect by Islamic scholars.
Khurshid Ahmad, a former senator in Pakistan's parliament and head of the Islamabad-based Institute of Policy Studies, questioned the tape's veracity in a carefully written critique that has been widely circulated among Muslim intellectuals.
"After carefully seeing and listening to the video on CNN for an hour, one remains as confused, uninformed and unenlightened as ever before," he concluded.
In such an environment, the release by Al Jazeera this week of new tapes that include some of the Sept. 11 hijackers, a claim of responsibility for the attacks and a voice that the broadcaster says is Bin Laden's would appear unlikely to change many minds. The phenomenon is too complex for that.
It is true that in some Muslim areas, there is evidence of at least a partial shift of opinion. Within Britain's large Muslim community, for example, the radical Al Muhajiroun movement says it now accepts documentary evidence of Al Qaeda's involvement after initially labeling the attack an American-Israel conspiracy. Normally outspoken religious conservatives in Malaysia have also stopped professing Bin Laden's innocence, but such developments remain at the margins.
The result of all this is a plethora of theories, many of them conspiratorial. Sadat said during a recent lunch with reporters in Hong Kong that she believes the attacks were the work of Americans disaffected with their new president, George W. Bush.
"No one else could have the sophistication to do it," she said.
While many fundamentalists in Egypt do tend to credit Bin Laden with instigating the attack, mainstream opinion does not.
Amr Waked, 30, an economist and financial analyst who graduated from the American University in Cairo, recalled that more than half the Americans who voted in the 2000 presidential election chose someone other than Bush. "In my opinion, one of those 50% did it," he said. "No one in the world gained anything from this but the Israelis."
Perhaps the wildest explanation that spread through the Muslim world in the days after the attacks was that they had been the work of Israeli intelligence, which had managed to secretly warn 4,000 Jews to stay home from work on Sept. 11.
In the Muslim majority region of the southern Philippines, the influential religious leader Ali Yacub, who teaches at Western Mindanao University in Zamboanga, pointed the finger at what he termed unspecified militants, then added, "Nothing will convince me that Osama was behind the World Trade Center attacks except Osama himself."
The collective impact of militant propaganda and the rejection of Bin Laden's guilt by many respected intellectuals have also helped nurture his image on the streets as a brave man fighting for good in an evil, American-dominated world.
"He's my hero," said Budi Prasetyo, a 27-year-old office worker employed by an American company in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. "He's a symbol of resistance against tyranny."
Marshall reported from Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong and Slackman from Cairo. Times staff writer Marjorie Miller in Los Angeles and special correspondents Janet Stobart in London, Sari Sudarsono in Jakarta and Al Jacinto in Zamboanga contributed to this report.
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
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