Bin Laden’s Reading List for Americans

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Tue Sep-22-09 12:16 AM
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Bin Laden’s Reading List for Americans

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Mr. Bin Laden apparently released a new audiotape, entitled “An Address to the American People.” According to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist Web sites, on the tape, a voice claiming to be that of the Qaeda leader described three books that he says support his analysis of global politics and the systematic maltreatment of Muslims at the hands of America and her allies. Here is the blurb from hell the books’ authors will not want to see printed on their jackets above Mr. Bin Laden’s name: “After you read the suggested books, you will know the truth, and you will be greatly shocked by the scale of concealment that has been exercised on you.”

On the list:

1. “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.
2. “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” in which former President Jimmy Carter gives his views about how best to end the Arab-Israeli conflict, and criticizes Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the territories. While the voice on the tape does not mention this book by name, it calls on Americans to “read what your former president, Carter, wrote regarding Israeli racism against our people in Palestine,” in a characterization of the book that goes beyond Mr. Carter’s own language.

In his review of Mr. Carter’s book in The New York Times, Ethan Bronner wrote:

This is a strange little book about the Arab-Israeli conflict from a major public figure. It is premised on the notion that Americans too often get only one side of the story, one uncritically sympathetic to Israel, so someone with authority and knowledge needs to offer a fuller picture. Fine idea. The problem is that in this book Jimmy Carter does not do so. Instead, he simply offers a narrative that is largely unsympathetic to Israel. Israeli bad faith fills the pages. Hollow statements by Israel’s enemies are presented without comment. Broader regional developments go largely unexamined. In other words, whether or not Carter is right that most Americans have a distorted view of the conflict, his contribution is to offer a distortion of his own.

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3. The third book referred to on the tape is called “The Apology of a Hired Killer,” according to the SITE translation. The book is said to have been written by “a former CIA agent who lived in two cultures, whose conscience was awakened in his third decade and decided to say the truth despite threats.” The voice on the tape says that this author is “the best to clarify to you the causes of the eleventh,” apparently meaning the attacks of September 11, 2001. While there seems to be no book of that title and description, at least one analyst has suggested that Mr. bin Laden may have been reading “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” by John Perkins.

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http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/bin-ladens-reading-list-for-americans/?hp