Anti-Semitic poster
Anti-Semitic posterIsrael news photo:file

Hatred of Jews and claims that the US “attacked” Muslims by “helping Jews occupy Palestine” were one of the reasons for Bin Laden’s anti-American terror. Hatred of the West and what it stands for played a much larger part, but Bin Laden, in true anti-Semitic tradition, tried to whip up anti- Jewish feeling by claiming that the Jews are one of the reasons for his terrorist acts. INN has researched  the anti-Semitic angle.

The leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist network was responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers and nearly 3,000 civilians who were killed in the 9/11 attacks in the United States. He hated America and the liberty and justice it represents.

Howver, Jews in Israel bore the brunt of incitement he whipped up over the years. His intense hatred of any non-Muslims touching what he considered to be Muslim property enraged him.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the end of 1979 also drove him to lead terrorists to fight the “infidels.”  His obsessive revulsion of a Jewish presence in Israel did the same.

In his “Letter to America” in 2002, after the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden wrote, "Some American writers have published articles under the title 'On what basis are we fighting?'...  Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. You attacked us in Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.”

Bin Laden denied any Jewish connection to Israel: ”The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites. It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed... If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.”

His contorted logic allowed him to claim, contrary to reason and fact, as more and more Palestinian Authority clerics now argue as well, that Muslims actually lived in Israel long before the Muslim religion was founded. “When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islam,” according to Bin Laden. In actual fact, the Romans had conquered Jerusalem from the Jews in the year 70 C.E., six centuries before Mohammed's founding of Islam.

Blaming American for supporting “atrocities” and “aggression” in Chechnya, Kashmir and Lebanon, Bin Laden also pointed the finger at Jews. “These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people,” he wrote.

He then reasoned that since Americans vote for their government freely, they “have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians... The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine... So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us…"

The United States would not have gained his approval had it abandoned Israel. According to Bin Laden, he would have stopped fighting if Americans were to accept Islam as their religion and then “stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.”