Michael Moore's protege
Herald Sun | 3rd November 2004 | Andrew Bolt
It's easy to see where Osama bin Laden got his inspiration for his latest video release. Just watch Mike Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.
OSAMA bin Laden has clearly seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.
In fact, he loved the movie so much that he's borrowed the script.
That's why bin Laden's weekend videotape of threats against the United States sounds so familiar.
It contains at least 15 passages that repeat or seemingly endorse anti-American and anti-Bush smears from Moore's wildly praised "documentary", as well as his best-selling books and internet writings.
Here is proof that Moore and his savage army of anti-American activists in the West really are giving comfort to the enemy in this fight against Islamist terrorists, knowingly or not.
Bin Laden seems even to have heard Moore's complaint that September 11 killed mainly Democratic voters, rather than people from states that backed Republican George W. Bush.
Cried Moore: "They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California these were places that voted against Bush."
BIN Laden took the tip. In his 18-minute video, advising Americans how to "prevent another Manhattan", he advises the voters of each US state to think of their safety.
"Every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security," he says, according to a translation by al-Jazeera, the network which aired the al-Qaida chief's tape.
Much of the rest of his rant is a furious denunciation of Bush that sounds as if also penned by Moore, or lifted from Fahrenheit 9/11.
You think this unfair? Well, check for yourself by comparing key parts of bin Laden's speech to passages from Moore's own work.
Bin Laden: "We fight because we are free men who do not sleep under oppression."
Moore: "The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not `insurgents' or `terrorists' or `The Enemy'. They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow and they will win." (Minutemen were American revolutionaries who fought Britain for independence.)
Bin Laden: "Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real cause (of September 11) . . ."
Moore: "We have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons." Fahrenheit 9/11 claims: "The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects . . . to keep the very structure of society intact."
Bin Laden: ". . . it had never occurred to us to strike towers (but) we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israel coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon . . ."
Moore: "You and I and millions of other taxpaying Americans . . . buy bullets that go into the Israeli guns that kill the Palestinian children."
Bin Laden: Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, "became jealous of (Arab autocrats who) embezzle the public wealth of the nation", and now his son's administration resembles these regimes, "characterised by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth".
Moore: Fahrenheit 9/11 falsely claims Saudi Arabian leaders bought off the Bush family by investing $US1.4 billion in them, their friends and their businesses. Moore elsewhere rages: "These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down . . ."
Bin Laden: "The Bush Administration has also gained (from the war on terror), of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced."
Moore: "Halliburton is not a `company' doing business in Iraq. It is a WAR PROFITEER." Fahrenheit 9/11 claims Bush invaded Afghanistan not to destroy al-Qaida, but to win a gas pipe deal there that benefited Halliburton, once led by Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Bin Laden: Bush's father "took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act under the pretence of fighting terrorism."
Moore: Fahrenheit 9/11 claims the Patriot Act harassed "people (who) were just minding their own business, or seeking to partake in our free society".
Bin Laden: Bush took "expertise in election fraud from the region's presidents to Florida".
Moore: Fahrenheit 9/11 claims Bush cronies in Florida rigged the vote, allowing "daddy's friends on the Supreme Court" to illegally hand him the election.
Bin Laden: Bush on S-11 left "50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone . . . because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important".
Moore: Fahrenheit 9/11 shows Bush watching students being read to as he is told of the attacks. Moore sneers that "with no one telling him what to do . . . Mr Bush just sat there, and continued to read My Pet Goat with the children".
There's more examples of Moore's propaganda matching bin Laden's script, but you get the idea.
Nor is this a freak coincidence. One of the Bali bombers, Sumadra, had his lawyer quote Moore in court last year to justify his murder of 202 people and organisations connected to the terrorist Hezbollah offered to help market Fahrenheit 9/11 in the Middle East.
No wonder, that, given Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, seems as scripted by Moore as does bin Laden.
Here's Moore on the war on Iraq: "This is the war of a despotic, arrogant and cruel country against the nations of the world."
And here's Nasrallah: "The US Government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for US corporations to do business in other countries."
NO, all this is beyond a coincidence. Moore darling of the US Democrat party and winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or for Fahrenheit 9/11 really is singing the terrorists' favourite songs.
Of course, he probably believes what he chants is true, even the obvious untruths. He probably condemns most of the killings the terrorists do for the cause he helps them to justify. Nor is there a lack of activists, actors, writers and academics who are with him in seeing Islamist terrorists as just freedom fighters against a despotic US.
But if you believe such terrorists are actually at war with freedom ours as well as that of Muslims then Moore's raucous preaching sounds too much like the crowing of carrion eaters.
It sounds, in fact, just like the squawking of surrender.
