Osama bin Laden reads Noam Chomsky: Who Knew?

From the New York Times story on Osama bin Laden's recent attack on the US for being responsible for global warming, we have Osama giving a big shout out to Noam Chomsky.

"In the message broadcast on Friday, Mr. bin Laden veered away from his traditional vows to inflict death and destruction on the United States, and instead discussed climate change, globalization and monetary policy in a message that he said was directed to “the whole world.”

He called for a worldwide boycott of American goods and the dollar. He faulted the United States for failing to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which sought to curb global warming by restricting greenhouse gas emissions. And he offered a word of praise for Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and liberal political activist.

“Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. policies to those of the Mafia,” Al Jazeera quoted Mr. bin Laden as saying. “They are the true terrorists, and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the U.S. dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible.”

What do you make of that? It is interesting that the radical left (Chomsky), the eco-fascists and the radical Islamists all find the rhetoric of global warming (which purportedly is caused by industrial civilization) useful in attacking the United States and calling for the destruction of capitalism in general and the US economy in particular. So we have an external enemy of Western civilization and two internal enemies, all of whom justify violence in the cause of attacking the West.

Ideologically, one might think that these movements make strange bedfellows, that they have nothing in common. But there is one common thread: the belief that Western civilization is evil and that revolution is the way to progress. We can observe the following interesting points on the basis of these facts.

1. All these movements agree that violent revolution is necessary in the face of a Western civilization that is evil from top to bottom. In the case of the Islamists, who are partly external enemies, they focus on trying to rouse the Muslim population within the West to rise up in revolt.

2. They all agree that no matter what emerges from the rubble it must inevitably be better than what now exists.

3. They all agree that Christianity has had great influence on Western civilization and that this influence is evil.

4. All these groups (and others) find the global warming issue convenient because it accuses the industrialized countries of being enemies of the planet.

5. All are anti-capitalist. When Hugo Chavez attacked capitalism as the root of all evil in the world at the climate change conference in Copenhagen, he received a standing ovation.

The left, the global warming alarmists and the Muslims seeking to overthrow the West are all, thus, committed to revolution, anti-Christian, pro-global warming alarmism and anti-capitalist. Despite the many things on which they differ, these things unite them in what could be called the spirit of the French Revolution or the spirit of '68.

Conservatives, naturally, reject all of this agenda as utopian, naive, violent, negative and presumptuous.