Obfuscating Allah by Gaslighting the West
This article is an expanded excerpt from a future series of articles Murder Pop is preparing for “The Day That Changed America,” September 11th, 2001.
Although we did not intend to publish this material for some time, the recent viral Tik Tok videos of some subsection of American youth taking the Bin Laden letter at face value has motivated Murder Pop to publish this excerpt of our analysis of the Bin Laden letter.
We have expanded the excerpt to examine not only Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” but to explore the differences between domestic propaganda produced by Islamists for the Middle East and the propaganda they produce for Western audiences, intended to obfuscate their religious motivations by exploiting Western political divisions and playing to Western sympathies and biases.
Supposed Motivations of al Qaeda
As far as organizational motivations of al Qaeda, many were presented to Western audiences in Bin Laden’s “Letter to America”, published in November 2002, which we will examine one by one.
Support of Israel by United States
The expansion of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased.
Israel has been a key ally in the Global War on Terror that has held this threat off since a resurgent Islamic movement began in the decades after the end of World War II. Israel’s historical claim to the territory is older than Islam, let alone Islamic control of the region, which began sometime around the year 700 CE. More on that later.
Historical claims are also an arbitrary standard by which to determine who has the right to control a given territory, and who is an imperial colonizer unfairly preying on disadvantaged groups who deserve social justice.
Support of Israel was also mentioned in a 1998 Al-Qaeda fatwā:
[T]he aim [of the United States] is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan…
Environmental destruction
You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gasses more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.
This is a false claim widely believed by Western environmentalists, which is likely where it originated, and was picked up by Bin Laden during his time in the West.
American immorality
The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you. (a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.
This seemingly needs no analysis. The freedom to pursue individualistic secular interests, and the separation of church and state, are Western values rejected by the caliphate groups on the basis of their religious creed.
Sanctions imposed against Iraq
Despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation… On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim…
As we will discuss in a moment, only Islamic aggression is valid in the eyes of the Islamist caliphates. They play this same game with the crusades, often mentioning them as the beginning of the conflicts between east and west, ignoring their incursions in what are known as the Arab–Byzantine wars, a series of conflicts that began with early waves of Muslim immigration to the Byzantine Empire from the 7th to the 11th century.
Presence of US military in Saudi Arabia
"You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon. . . We also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines."
The United States was invited to Saudi Arabia by Saudi Arabia; this is an extension of what is discussed immediately above.
Muslims from Arabia in the 600s began invading the Byzantine empire in mass waves of immigration, resulting in the rapid loss of territory from Byzantium's southern provinces of what are now Syria and Egypt to the emergent Turkic-Ottoman Caliphate.
Contrary to the beliefs of the thousands of Western kids who have posted videos to Tik Tok about the Bin Laden letter, researcher Robert Pape found three key elements of motivation for suicide attacks, none of which include environmental degradation or American support of Israel.
They are:
A foreign presence;
by a democratic regime;
of a different religion.
Mia Bloom interviewed friends and relatives of suicide bombers; her conclusions support Pape's, suggesting that the perception of either colonization or foreign occupation is necessary to get people to volunteer for suicide missions or martyrdom in the face of retaliatory military actions by Western democracies.
Raymond Ibrahim, as a researcher at the Library of Congress, found a significant difference between Islamist messages in English intended for a Western audience and Arabic messages intended for an Islamic audience. His findings support the conclusions of Pape and Bloom.
Adam Raisman, senior analyst at SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist internet content, said that the group paid media personnel the same wage it pays to fighters.
“Islamic State did more to court audiences. It was the first to branch out on social media. It named those who promoted its caliphate and ideology on social media as 'mujahedeen,'” Adam Raisman said. “No other group courted support like that.”
Media created exclusively for an Islamic, middle eastern audience consists of only theological messages focused on Islam, Allah, and the duty of suicide attacks on foreign crusaders, without any reference to the supposed “criminal acts” of Western nations Bin Laden references in his letter to Americans, and which Islamist groups routinely refer to.
An August 2015 publication titled “You are a Mujahid, O Media Man,” from the Al Himmah Library, which is part of the Islamic State organization, declared that “the power of words is sharper (stronger) than atomic bombs.”
“Inciting jihad,” it says, is equal to “waging jihad. So my dear unknown media soldier, know how valuable your role is in attaining victory… You are a mujahid for the cause of Allah.”
The Global War on Terror has diminished the ability to spread these message and recruit new fighters. The last issue of Roumiyeh, the flagship magazine of ISIS, was published in September 2017; only Al Nabaa', its weekly Arabic newspaper, remains.
Weekly multimedia releases are no more, as are the now defunct Islamic State magazines Dabiq and Constantinople, named for the capital of the Ottoman empire caliphate.
And while the extremists once enjoyed free rein on social media networks like Twitter/X, Facebook, YouTube and Telegram, social media has become more efficient at removing extremist content from their platforms using machine learning algorithms in addition to user reports to identify such media.
Now, decentralized sympathizers participate in the global Meme War on their behalf, trading propaganda and arguing in a kind of digital proxy war that includes both independent actors and state agents up to who knows what kind nefarious ends.
Another example of this same style of gaslighting can be seen in the Israeli conflict with Hamas, such as in the 2017 re-write of their genocidal and anti-Semitic charter document. A careful read through, however, will show you the truth hidden behind this whitewashing.
For example; in the new charter, article 19 makes a veiled historical claim to the region, drawing on the legitimization of Islamic claims to the territory via the Ottoman Empire.
Except the region was Roman, Greek, and Jewish long before it was Muslim. What’s the difference? Well, Islamic conquests are valid; Western conquests into lands historically controlled by Western ancestors are incursions into Islamic spaces that were rightfully conquered by the Ottoman Turks for all eternity. Their previous charter made this explicitly clear.
In a similar glaring contradiction, article 17 first rejects persecution and the violations of rights as they relate to nationalist or religious claims; it then goes on to immediately reject Jewish nationalist and religious claims, before referring to “the Jewish problem,” and blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.
These reconstructions are intended to manipulate known western sympathies and biases, and they seek to exploit the naivete of comfortable western youth who have been propagandized to believe all manner of nonsense about the motivations of an Islamist movement that consists of a seemingly endless number of competing caliphate groups that want to either kill or forcibly convert as many people as possible in order to re-establish or resurrect the Islamic Ottoman empire that collapsed early in the 20th century.
Another example of this game playing: al-Shifa hospital, at which both representatives of the UN and members of Doctors Without Borders were present at various times, and said nothing of Hamas war crimes being conducted on the premises such as civilian hostages being brought through…
After taking the hospital, the IDF released security camera footage that clearly shows armed Hamas militants, one armed with a meat cleaver, bringing hostages through the hospital complex.
Not only were hostages brought into the Al-Shifa hospital complex, some are known to have been murdered at the hospital, and are believed to have been tortured based on the condition of their bodies.
Another video released by the Israeli military shows an IDF drone begin explorations of a shaft that enters into a network of extensive underground tunnels. Islamist propaganda on social media claims this is a water reservoir despite the video from the drone being strangely devoid of any water or looking anything like a water reservoir.
The Islamist Caliphate groups and their partners represent a clear and present danger to Western interests, and the safety of Westerners as we move forward in a world in which UN Women calls for justice in Gaza but says nothing about the mass rape of Israeli women on 10/7 and an Iranian presence on the UN Human Rights Council as the chair of the Human Rights Council Social Forum. The same Iran that the UN condemned earlier this year over its human rights abuses.
Tik Tok, which has links to the Chinese Communist Party who recently signed a 25 year military cooperation agreement with a major financial partner of Hamas, Iran, has removed the hashtag associated with the viral bin laden video (#LettertoAmerica), but the videos remain on the platform and have been viewed close to 15 million times.
Tik Tok created an entirely new X account, Tik Tok Policy, to address the controversy and claim that a thread on X caused the videos to go viral.
This narrative is undone by google trends. The marked point shows when the referenced X thread was published on X. As you can see, although it did seemingly increase interest, the virality began well before the X thread.
This is not a problem the west will be able to resolve through state censorship, which threatens the free speech rights that Westerners, particularly Americans, hold near and dear to our hearts.
Instead, we must build robust information distribution systems such as Community Notes on X, that can be used to minimize the effectiveness of digital propaganda distribution and disinformation campaigns by foreign actors hostile to Western democracies.
We should also work to resolve our culture wars and minimize our political divisions, which create space for these hostile actors to ingress, and manipulate our political discourse.