Osama: Islamist religious fanatic. Saddam: secular Stalinist dictator. Oil and water, right? Bin Laden would never work with the apostate Saddam, and vice versa, right? Their methods, motivation, beliefs, and language are mutually exclusive, right?
Listen to this bilge read Tuesday night by Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf:
- “jihad is a duty” of Muslims everywhere. Clearly jihad was being used here in the Islamist sense of a bloody holy war against the infidels, not in the moderate Islamic sense of an inner struggle for self-improvement or a search for peace. What tips you off is when Sahhaf added that Americans “are aggressors, evil, accursed by God.”
At times, Saddam’s spokesman sounded almost like a QVC pitchman. He told Iraqi fighters that the war now underway offers “your chance for immortality” and that, if they acted now, there would be this special bonus: “Those who are martyred will be rewarded in heaven.”
Sahhaf concluded by saying that “the aggression that the aggressors are carrying out against the stronghold of faith is an aggression on the religion, the wealth, the honor and the soul, and an aggression on the land of Islam.” [Clifford May in NRO]
Now what cave-dwelling, camel-humping, possibly-deceased terrorist does this sound like to you?