This one really takes the cake. William Blum's anti-imperialist tome Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower has shot up from 205,763 to 26 on Amazon.com [2]'s index of the most-ordered books since it was given a favorable review by Osama bin Laden. Wrote the acccused terror mastermind in his Jan. 19 communique:
"And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book 'Rogue State,' which states in its introduction: 'If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First, I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all.'"
Rogue State has been published in Arabic in Egypt and Lebanon, and the Washington Post [3] chuckles: "Perhaps bin Laden owns the entire Blum canon, because the quote he cited is not in 'Rogue State' but on the back of a collection of Blum essays, 'Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire.'"
The Post helpfully provides Blum's exact words:
"If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days... I would first apologize—very publicly and very sincerely—to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism."
In response to Osama's rave review, Blum engaged in requisite, ritual distancing from bin Laden and 9-11: "I am totally against what they did. But we cannot view that as totally the acts of a bunch of madmen. If we do...we will continue making the same mistakes, and the so-called war on terror will be as doomed to fail as the war on drugs." But, engaging in the usual muddled thinking which characterizes the contemporary American left, he also welcomed Osama's comments: "I was not turned off by such an endorsement," he informed a New York radio station. "I'm not repulsed, and I'm not going to pretend I am."
WW4 REPORT is convinced that, far from owning the complete Blum canon, Osama has read no more of the man's words than the jacket blurb he incorrectly quotes. If he had actually read Rogue State, Osama would know that Blum is a shameless apologist for Slobodan Milosevic—who surely ranks right up there with George Bush as one of the greatest mass murderers of Muslims alive today.
For instance, in Rogue State, Blum writes of the 1999 Kosova crisis that "the systematic forced deportations of large numbers of people did not begin until a few days after the bombing began, and was clearly a reaction to it, born of extreme anger and powerlessness." You don't have to be a supporter of the NATO bombing to recognize this as pure bunk: there were already half a million Albanians displaced by Serb violence from their homes in Kosova before the bombing started. (The number quickly doubled once the bombing began.) (See "William Blum Denies Serbian Atrocities in Kosovo," Balkan Witness [4])
Blum is actually a board member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic [5] (ICDSM)—the surest sign that his concern with "widows and orphans" is no more sincere than that of the imperialist butchers he loves to hate.
Most ironic of all is that a fave canard of Milosevic-apologists on the American left is that the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosova are jihadi extremists who were turning the Balkans into an al-Qaeda beachhead! Edward Herman, another darling of the American left whose work is prominently featured on the ICDSM website [6] wrote for ZNet [7] last year an openly revisionist piece entitled "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre," which claimed to expose "the Clinton/Bosnian Muslim role in giving Al Qaeda a foothold in the Balkans, Izetbegovic's close alliance with Osama bin Laden, his Islamic Declaration declaring hostility to a multi-ethnic state, the importation of 4,000 Mujahaden to fight a holy war in Bosnia, with active Clinton administration aid, and the KLA-Al Qaeda connection."
Time to get some new interns, Osama.
See our last post [8] on Osama's new media splash, and on the ongoing Balkan mess [9]. See also our last feature on "leftist" revisionism [10] on Bosnia.
