Originally Posted by GUWonder
.... and your ability to read or understand spoken Arabic relying upon your own faculties is great, right? And translations and take aways are always correct, right?
After all, a self-avowed spokesman/defender of terrorism will always speak the truth. And such persons would never make a grandiose statement to try to gain more recruits in an attempt to gain greater geographic influence. Never.
Simple minds require that there has to be a simple principal cause/reason, for the idea of multiple causality just confuses simple minds to the point of their seeking security in an oversimplified world of their own mind's creation.
Anti-(European)colonial sentiment plays a large part in the minds of OBL and the like-minded (amongst others) as does their desire to see that manifestation of anti-colonial or xenophobic sentiment which is often terrorism; however, the reason for such sentiment is not simply to reconstitute the Sick Man of Europe; it's to go back even further to an ARAB not TURKISH (read: Ottoman) "calipahte" where external powers had lesser influence in "the Arab Heartland".
Right, and bin Laden is still steaming about the double-dealing of the British and French from the Sykes-Picot Agreement. You are partly correct, OBL is not that pleased with the "enforcement" of the Ottoman caliph over Arab lands for about 600 years, but it is all about transnationalism in his mind and reversing the "wrongs" inflicted upon the Muslim world by the infidels. OBL has no qualms about using "history" in order to gain greater support for his cause.
According to British Intelligence Officer and Neo-Con Bernard Lewis:
"Bin Laden has an intensely historical view of the world. He frequently refers to his enemy as “crusaders.” The Crusaders, it may be recalled, were neither Americans nor Jews. His general vision comes through fairly clear: He sees this as an ongoing struggle for more than 14 centuries between the two rival world religions. For a long time Christians were in retreat, Muslims were advancing. Then came the series of bitter defeats: the loss of Spain, the invasion of the Muslim lands by European Christian imperialists, and what he calls the final humiliation, the defeat in 1918 of the last of the great Muslim states, the Ottoman Empire. Its ruler was captured, its territory partitioned. And he sees himself engaged in the great counterattack, of which phase one is to oust the unbelievers from the lands of Islam and thus prepare the stage for the next and final stage: the battle for world religious leadership and, with it, domination."