Who said anything about his socioeconomic position? He was in fact wildly rich. He was a product of US interventionism. He had been a CIA asset for years. He didn’t just wake up one day and decide that Allah wanted him to blow up buildings on the other side of the world, for no reasons connected to US foreign policy.
But the U.S. government and the American press have not always opposed Afghan extremists. During the 1980s, the Mujahiddin guerrilla groups battling Soviet occupation had key features in common with the Taliban. In many ways, the Mujahiddin groups acted as an incubator for the later rise of the Taliban in the 1990s.
Despite CIA denials of any direct Agency support for Bin Laden’s activities, a considerable body of circumstantial evidence suggests the contrary. During the 1980s, Bin Laden’s activities in Afghanistan closely paralleled those of the CIA. Bin Laden held accounts in the Bank for Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the bank the CIA used to finance its own covert actions. Bin Laden worked especially closely with Hekmatyar—the CIA’s favored Mujahiddin commander. In 1989, the U.S. shipped high-powered sniper rifles to a Mujahiddin faction that included bin Laden, according to a former bin Laden aide.
If Islamism is the ultimate cause of 9/11 then Islamism must be the ultimate cause of October 7th which is literally the same story and the same propagandistic cover in the West.
I think a lot of people don’t understand geopolitics in the sense that it’s not a functional system of yeses and noes, it’s a system of maybes based on maybes.
The ultimate cause of October 7th is that the geopolitical factors especially the intentions of the US were to remove Palestinian question from the heart of the security architecture of the Middle East. October 7th was effective because it closed off the possibility of the Abraham Accords and a Middle Eastern security architecture based on a Saudi/Israeli/Egyptian agreement which was tacitly against Iran and the Palestinians.
Likewise the ultimate cause of 9/11 was based on geopolitical factors. The first Al-Queda fatwas said
It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience.
They’re literally referencing Chechnia and Tajikistan here. It’s a complex geopolitical statement. This is a group that has fought the USSR, who were not Zionist-Crusaders in their opinion. The references to Chechnia and Tajikistan were directly based on the calamity that liberalization of the USSR brought upon Muslims, that the US helped lead into those positions. Much like the Chicago boys in Russia.
The second said
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
Bin Laden himself has pointed to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon:
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses were destroyed along with their occupants, high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy…As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America so that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.[32]
The idea that 9/11 was the invention of Osama Bin Laden getting high on Islam in a Mosque while chanting and then telling his evil followers that god has told him to destroy America is a false American invention seeking to discredit the actual geopolitical arguments that underpinned the attacks, and transform them into merely cultural grievances that escalated into a war which is easy to sell to a moronic liberal audience all to ready to consume propaganda because the Soviet Union fell and they needed a new bad guy that hated them for their freedom.
The fact that this isn’t common information despite being in multiple reputable places online speaks to the propagandized nature of the discussion of this event in America.
This wasn’t about globohomo, women’s rights, American cultural permissiveness, or any other bromides you can easily fit into “religious extremism” narratives. It was simply about the imperialism of the American Empire.
My friend, how are you so knowledgeable, I’m an avid fan of history and geopolitics. Do did you learn from books, articles, papers or just alot of digging and curiosity?
It’s a combination of books, news sources, and some formal education. I was lucky that my highschool still heavily invested in humanities before I went off to a stupid ass tech collage. Beyond that I am constantly researching things because I’m weird. So when people pull up reasons that are fairly well documented quite literally easily sourced on wikipedia of all places it’s incredibly easy for me to remember and reference them.
I’ll post it again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation
But for real though, Osama benefitted from Western Imperialism and was directly motivated by religious scripture, not his socioeconomic position.
Who said anything about his socioeconomic position? He was in fact wildly rich. He was a product of US interventionism. He had been a CIA asset for years. He didn’t just wake up one day and decide that Allah wanted him to blow up buildings on the other side of the world, for no reasons connected to US foreign policy.
6 December 1993: Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace
FAIR: Forgotten Coverage of Afghan ‘Freedom Fighters’
I’m aware - I think we disagree on which is the proximate and which is the ultimate cause.
If Islamism is the ultimate cause of 9/11 then Islamism must be the ultimate cause of October 7th which is literally the same story and the same propagandistic cover in the West.
I think a lot of people don’t understand geopolitics in the sense that it’s not a functional system of yeses and noes, it’s a system of maybes based on maybes.
The ultimate cause of October 7th is that the geopolitical factors especially the intentions of the US were to remove Palestinian question from the heart of the security architecture of the Middle East. October 7th was effective because it closed off the possibility of the Abraham Accords and a Middle Eastern security architecture based on a Saudi/Israeli/Egyptian agreement which was tacitly against Iran and the Palestinians.
Likewise the ultimate cause of 9/11 was based on geopolitical factors. The first Al-Queda fatwas said
They’re literally referencing Chechnia and Tajikistan here. It’s a complex geopolitical statement. This is a group that has fought the USSR, who were not Zionist-Crusaders in their opinion. The references to Chechnia and Tajikistan were directly based on the calamity that liberalization of the USSR brought upon Muslims, that the US helped lead into those positions. Much like the Chicago boys in Russia.
The second said
Bin Laden himself has pointed to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon:
The idea that 9/11 was the invention of Osama Bin Laden getting high on Islam in a Mosque while chanting and then telling his evil followers that god has told him to destroy America is a false American invention seeking to discredit the actual geopolitical arguments that underpinned the attacks, and transform them into merely cultural grievances that escalated into a war which is easy to sell to a moronic liberal audience all to ready to consume propaganda because the Soviet Union fell and they needed a new bad guy that hated them for their freedom.
The fact that this isn’t common information despite being in multiple reputable places online speaks to the propagandized nature of the discussion of this event in America.
This wasn’t about globohomo, women’s rights, American cultural permissiveness, or any other bromides you can easily fit into “religious extremism” narratives. It was simply about the imperialism of the American Empire.
My friend, how are you so knowledgeable, I’m an avid fan of history and geopolitics. Do did you learn from books, articles, papers or just alot of digging and curiosity?
It’s a combination of books, news sources, and some formal education. I was lucky that my highschool still heavily invested in humanities before I went off to a stupid ass tech collage. Beyond that I am constantly researching things because I’m weird. So when people pull up reasons that are fairly well documented quite literally easily sourced on wikipedia of all places it’s incredibly easy for me to remember and reference them.
Yes, it’s a rich tapestry.
Why did he constantly talk about how the attacks were politically motivated? What is the basis for claiming that he was motivated by religion?
https://lemmy.ml/comment/15291634
Are you trolling?