Osama Praises Arab Spring - New Tape

[marshabar1]

Washington, May 19: Al-Qaeda has released the first audio message of Osama bin Laden after his death, praising the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and predicting that the revolt would engulf the entire Arab region.

“The winds of change started from Tahrir Square will blow over the entire Muslim world,” bin Laden is quoted as saying in the 13-minute message, apparently recorded months before he was shot dead by US forces at his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan.

The audio tape was released on-line yesterday to ‘jihadists’ websites by al-Qaeda’s media arm al-Sahab and was obtained and translated by America’s SITE intelligence group. The “posthumous” tape has an apparent reference to revolts in Tunisia and Egypt and includes still images emblazoned with an old picture of the al Qaeda leader.

“This wasn’t a revolution of starving and pain, but a revolution of giving and peace... The great oppression in our countries has reached great levels, and we have delayed enough the wave of change,” he says.

The al-Qaeda leader, who was killed by US forces in a special operation in Pakistan on May 2 asks Muslims to not let the new wave of revolution wear out.

In the tape, bin Laden accused Arab leaders of building themselves into idols and manipulating to stay in power. He tells Muslims to fight ignorance for the revolutions to succeed.

“Oh Muslims, you have seen many revolutions in your past... Those that the people have been so happy about, but then have turned into nothing. And the way to keep these revolutions from having the same problem is fighting ignorance.

“And some of the most important information is Islam. For this is the true crisis that has hit our nations,” he says according to available translation of his message. The US intelligence officials were aware that the recording was in the pipeline.

Bin Laden was known to record many of his thoughts and US intelligence experts are pouring through the recordings seized from his Abbottabad compound.

But its unclear whether more such recordings are in the pipeline or whether this was the finals sermon from the the ‘merchant of death’. PTI

www.indiatvnews.com/news/World/Al_Qaeda_Releases_Osama_s_Posthumous_Audio_Praisin_-3811.html

Well then the man died happy, except for the last shock of being found and killed.

[Deleted]

So, Osammy-- how'd that revolution work out for you??

[marshabar1]

Osama praising a Democratic uprising?

[Deleted]

LOL!! I caught this....
;D

[marshabar1]

"It seems a pretty transparent attempt to rewrite history and put al-Qaeda at the heart of the revolutions," said a security expert in Pakistan. "I think the young Arabs on barricades in Libya, Syria and Yemen will see through this."

US Navy Seals killed bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, a garrison town near the Pakistani capital on May 2. The incident has deeply embarrassed the country's military and spy agencies and led to calls by members of the US Congress for a tougher approach toward the country.

Bin Laden had not publicly reacted to the wave of demonstrations sweeping Arab countries before his death.

However, in a statement, al-Qaeda said he had recorded a commentary only a week before he was killed.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8523491/Osama-bin-Laden-new-tape-an-attempt-to-put-al-Qaeda-at-heart-of-revolutions.html

The tape. ^^

[marshabar1]

The image, caught on home video, is a defining one: a hunched Osama bin Laden, in pathetic, lonely domesticity, with a grey beard and a blanket covering him like a shawl, surveying the television wasteland for images of himself. How banal this epitome of evil turned out to be.

That is why Osama's elimination by US commandos is such a marvellous case study. Start with this question: Was it poetic or divine justice that al-Qaeda's leader, whose group, born in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1988, was fathered by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency and midwifed by the CIA, was finally killed by his figurative creators?

This question leads to two more that are anything but rhetorical: Where, in the end, does the fault for bin Laden's murderous decades lie? And will his death mark the end of global jihadist terrorism?

To be sure, street protests and a chaotic clamour of recrimination have gripped Pakistan, while dire threats float in the internet ether and a bizarre indifference pervades the rest of the Muslim world. But events in the Maghreb and the Middle East seem to demonstrate that the streams of Arab and Muslim political life are flowing away from Osama's murderous messianism.

That is why the crucial test today is what happens tomorrow in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The future of Pakistan, peace in Afghanistan, normalcy in India-Pakistan relations, and economic progress in South Asia all hinge on whether bin Laden's death dilutes extremism and dissolves intolerance or re-concentrates both.

The history of the region's discord is a complex mix of ethnic, territorial, and existential fears, imaginary or real. But now that America's mission in Afghanistan has, at least symbolically, achieved its objectives, a new chapter must open. To persist with the old "reordering" of Afghanistan would be sheer folly, dissipating whatever good might come from the end of Bin Laden's blood-soaked career.

But the United States alone cannot bring peace to the region. A broader regional condominium, involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, Russia, and, yes, Iran, must be brought into play.

For this to happen, however, the first step must come from Pakistan. It must now renounce terrorism as an instrument of state policy; stop employing groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba as strategic reserves against India; and abandon aspirations of acquiring overweening influence over the government in Kabul.
english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/2011515111349835716.html