|
Bin Laden's tape 'propaganda'
30/10/2004 16:06 - (SA)
Paris - Experts around the world called the videotape from Osama bin Laden a heavy-handed attempt to influence the US election just days before the vote, while warning against dismissing it as just propaganda.
"It's a very crude but sinister attempt to try to influence the presidential election," said Paul Wilkinson, chairperson of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University in Scotland.
"The US authorities must take the threat of violence seriously," he said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation shortly after the tape aired Friday night.
Australia's foreign minister said on Saturday that Australia and other nations must stand firm in the fight against terrorism and bin Laden.
"Whenever he says these things and whenever these Islamic extremists and fanatics say these things our message to them is a simple message, and that is: 'We will defy you and we will defeat you, and countries like Australia must not flinch in the face of these fanatics,"' he told reporters in Adelaide. "We must show an utter determination to confront them and defeat them."
'Unprecedented attack'
Montasser el-Zayat, a Cairo-based lawyer who defends Islamic radicals, said the video amounted to an "unprecedented attack on US President George W Bush at a very critical time, before the US elections" on November 2.
Bin Laden suggests Bush was slow to react to the September 11 attacks in 2001, giving the hijackers more time than they expected. The al-Qaeda leader mentioned Bush continuing to read to children in Florida while the attacks were under way.
"That gave us three times the time we needed to carry out the operation, thanks be to God," bin Laden says on the tape.
Diaa Rashwan, a Cairo-based expert on extremist Muslim militants, said bin Laden was trying to influence Americans "to give Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry their votes, not Bush."
However, Wilkinson told the BBC it was "too early" to predict whether it would help either candidate.
A more 'flagrant' form of propaganda
"It is certainly a more flagrant form of propaganda than we have seen before in relation to the American public, but it hasn't got a hope of influencing American foreign policy," he said.
"Whoever wins the US election will continue to wage war on al-Qaeda and its affiliates... whoever wins the election is unlikely to cut and run from Iraq because they know that policy would be seen as a defeat."
British newspapers reflected on the dramatic timing of the message, released four days before the US presidential election. "Bin Laden shocks US," was Saturday's headline in the Financial Times. "The genie is back in a swirl of dust," said The Times.
"Bin Laden has become to Bush what Saddam Hussein was to the president's father - a gloating survivor of US foreign policy," wrote The Times' Chris Ayres.
On websites devoted to extremist Muslim comment, contributors reacted with glee to the tape, saying it was proof bin Laden was alive and a "slap" at America.
- AP
|
News
