“It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,” Osama bin Laden told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.” Iit was the United States, bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard.
Though he was a threat to world peace yet what he said cannot be denied.
How are we benefitted from his killing? Probably by being saved from his dream of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century Islam.
