Chilling AP article about Messages To The World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden by Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence. Lawrence has assembled a decade’s worth of bin Laden’s statements from writings, interviews and videotaped messages, and hopes his book will shed light on both bin Laden’s project and his distortion of Islam to justify terrorist actions.
Lawrence calls bin Laden’s prose “stunning and lean” but cautions against its destructive world vision.“His is a dark message. It only goes one way: endless warfare. Muslims don’t come out better, only dead - or they have a much worse life on this Earth,” he says.
“We don’t want to have a World War III,” he says. “This is the ‘Mein Kampf’ of the 21st century.”
Perhaps the other chilling thought from this piece is the self-censorship apparent from academics:
Verso’s U.S. publisher, Amy Scholder, agrees that some scholars are afraid to work on such books. “There is this fear of disseminating information and being construed as thus collaborating with this information” she says.
The only way to stop terrorism is to study it and understand its roots. If academia gives up on doing that, who’s left?
Ben wrote a cracking article about Jason Burke’s Al Qaeda earlier this year.
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