 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Bin Laden recruits with graphic video©Washington Post
© St. Petersburg Times, NEW YORK -- A masked man in a loose-fitting black robe rolls once in the red dirt and leaps upright. Feet apart, he aims a pistol and fires once, twice, three times -- into a life-size moving video image of former President Bill Clinton. "Victory is from God, conquest is near," says the narrator. The mock assassination of an American president occurs halfway through the recruitment tape for al-Qaida, the terrorist organization. Shot at training bases in Afghanistan, and drawing on powerful and horrific news images of soldiers beating and killing Muslim women and children, the two-hour video offers a window into the worldview of the man who has led his followers into a war with the United States. That man, Osama bin Laden, appears throughout the video, as teacher and warrior. The film is powerful, tailored for young Arabic men in the manner of a well-done army recruitment tape. The film uses freeze frames of dying Arab children, zoom shots of the USS Cole before and after the explosion, and grainy footage of Americans lying dead in the wreckage of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A plaintive voice narrates much of the video, backed by snatches of poetry and ecstatic religious singing. The tape apparently was made in June or July and circulated throughout Arabic-speaking countries and Central Asia. The tape, which has been obtained by a number of news organizations around the world, includes footage of the ongoing intifada in Israel, the war in Chechnya and the destruction of the two colossal Buddha statues in Bamian, Afghanistan, this year; all are portrayed as heroic Muslim struggles against Jews and "crusaders." "It's very professional, with terrific production values," said Richard Bulliet, a professor of Islamic social history at Columbia University, who obtained the tape from CNN and analyzed it for the Washington Post. The film opens with a Holocaust-like montage of horrors perpetrated on Muslims. Dead boys, eyes vacant, stare up. Children scream, dirt is tossed on a coffin, a woman's face is soaked with blood. And, repeatedly, footage shows Israeli soldiers hitting children and shooting at civilians. An Israeli soldier is shown putting a dead baby into a garbage bag after a wartime attack on a Lebanese village. The film refers to Jews as "dogs" and "pigs." The faces of Clinton and members of the Saudi royal family are often superimposed. The message, Bulliet notes, is simple: The Jews are killing your men, women and children, backed by complicit Arab rulers and the United States. The film moves methodically to a call for a higra, or Muslim migration, to Afghanistan. There's footage of training camps in the mountainous reaches of Afghanistan, with scenes of men shooting guns, throwing grenades and rolling in the dust. Pre-adolescent boys, too, are shown singing and crawling under barbed wire. "This is not a film aimed at the intellectual," Bulliet said. "The target audience is an 18-year-old boy who is not particularly aware of the world but feels the visceral pain of the images." Nor does bin Laden play the lunatic or the fool. He is filmed clad in a white kaffiyeh, his beard streaked with gray. His voice is soothing, his manner gentle, even as he counsels followers to embrace death's liberation. To die after the horrors shown in the film, he suggests, is an act of altruism. "The love of this world is wrong," bin Laden tells his followers, according to a CNN translation. "You should love the other world, and you should not be afraid to die, because to die in the right cause and go to the other world, that's praiseworthy." The film's last 20 minutes are triumphal. The video depicts the death and destruction their fighters have inflicted on the West. The camera scans charred American bodies in Somalia, the blasted portions of a bombed U.S. Army base in Saudi Arabia, a state funeral at Arlington National Cemetery; all are portrayed as great victories. Throughout there is the sound of the voice-over: " ... with blood, with blood, with blood." The emphasis is on the continuous nature of the struggle, and so, Bulliet said, might be seen as foreshadowing the destruction of the World Trade Center. "This is a recruiting video for warriors," Bulliet said. "It's easy to see what the next video looks like. They just have to splice in the zillion of miles of footage from the World Trade Center."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
