Yemen It was in Yemen, bin Laden wrote, that the al-Sauds began “a habit of supporting the enemies of Islam.” The Yemeni people led by their ulema sought to overthrow the Yemeni Socialist Party, which “had enslaved the Yemeni people . . . killed innocent ulema . . . [and] spread apostasy and corruption.” Shockingly, bin Laden wrote, the al-Sauds— especially King Fahd and Prince Sultan—supported Yemen’s socialists against the Muslims, and exactly as they had in the Kingdom, Riyadh and its official scholars tried to ensure that the Yemeni socialists “shackled the Islamic Awakening in Yemen.”89 United Nations The ARC communiqués paid limited attention to the UN, but they did define the main theme bin Laden and al-Qaeda would later use toward the organization. “The UN,” bin Laden explained, was little more than “a tool to implement the Crusaders’ plans to kill the causes of the nation of Islam and its peoples.” Though this was obvious to Muslims, the Saudi regime still cooperated with UN initiatives in Pal- estine and, worse, abided by UN plans in the Balkans which allowed Bosnian Muslims to be “surrendered to the Serbian monster,” showing that the human rights and equality slogans the West raised through the UN “are nothing but dead slogans when it comes to Muslim mat- ters.” In supporting the UN, the ARC concluded, the al-Saud regime was “no different from the secular governments that publicly war on Islam . . . [and] secularism amounts to atheism.”90 NOMAD, 1989–1996 | 97 98 | OSAMA BIN LADEN United States “In reality,” bin Laden told King Fahd, “Saudi Arabia is no more than an American protectorate subject to American laws.”91 After the U.S. and Western militaries arrived in the Kingdom in 1990, he wrote, Riyadh had “filled it with American army bases,” even while “America and its allies steal and loot from the wealth and riches of the coun- try.”92 And, speaking of those forces, bin Laden asked the king, “don’t we [Saudis] have a right to ask about the reason they have stayed so long?”93 Bin Laden argued that Fahd, his ministers, and their scholars had permitted infidels to enter on the basis of an “arbitrary” fatwa which “insulted the honor of the ummah.”94 As a result of the decision, Riyadh had become Washington’s dependable surrogate: “If Islamic causes conflict with Western interests you have always stood up for Western interests” in such places as Palestine, Somalia, Algeria, Yemen, and Sudan. “Western and Crusader countries dictate your pol- icies from the outside,” bin Laden claimed, and you respond “by pro- tecting the interests of the infidel Western countries that encounter these Islamic causes.” If this was not the case, bin Laden asked, why was it that Riyadh and its scholars had pushed young Saudis to go and fight communists in Afghanistan, but stopped them from doing the same in Yemen? The answer, he said, was the United States wanted Soviet and Afghan communists killed, but preferred the stability pro- vided by the Marxist regime in Yemen.95 This foreign policy shattered the al-Sauds’ Islamic credibility, bin Laden concluded.96 Palestine With regard to this “mother of all Islamic issues,”97 the Saudi royal family and their scholars traitorously approved opening relations with the Zionists who were “usurping sacred Muslim land that God blessed.”98 Bin Laden condemned Shaykh bin Baz for his fatwa permitting peace with the Jews, claiming it gave “a veneer of legitimacy to the surrender [peace with Israel] that the treacherous cowardly Arab tyrants signed.”99 Bin Baz’s fatwa not only contradicted his earlier Palestine fatwas—which called for jihad until Jerusalem’s recovery and “Jewish foreigners return to their country”100—but was “a necessary step leading to the establishment of Greater Israel, extending from the Nile to the Euphrates and through large portions of the Arab Peninsula.”101 With the fatwa, bin Laden said, bin Baz proved he was not satisfied with having surrendered Mecca and Medina to U.S. occupation in 1990, but was now eager to please “a band of occupying Zionists in Palestine” by surrendering al-Aqsa Mosque.102 “The surrender peace with the Jews” signed by Riyadh and sanctioned by its scholars, bin Laden wrote, “inflicted harm on the ummah and defied reality.” “Who among the experts,” bin Laden asked, “said that more than a billion Muslims who own the largest natural resources on earth with strategic locations are unable to defeat 5 million Jews in Palestine?”103 In these ARC communiqués, bin Laden established that he was far from ready to give up on jihad, and, indeed, that he saw himself as fighting far more than the U.S. military’s presence on the Arabian Pen- insula. In fact, he had mapped out his future jihad’s parameters. He had not fully sorted out which target—the Saudis, the West, or the United States—should be hit first. He had, however, focused on Washington’s interference with and control over the al-Saud regime in a way suggesting that the United States was both a far and a near enemy, one all Muslims had an interest in evicting from their world. Moreover, bin Laden had clearly crossed his own personal Rubicon. By damning the Saudi royal family, publicly defaming and questioning the faith of King Fahd, Grand Mufti bin Baz, and other senior royals and scholars, and declaring that all of them were at war with God— and that he was taking God’s side—bin Laden made it clear that his commitment to jihad was for the long haul. The communiqués also made it clear that his motivation and that of al-Qaeda at the time—as it is today—was the belief that Islam was under attack by apostates from within and from U.S.-led Crusaders and Jews from without. The only proper response was defensive jihad.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 07:46:50 +0000
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