Bin Laden urges Americans to convert

[bombadillo]

Originally Posted by Ljubomir

Nono, if you really want Americans to buy in to something, you have to make it a gift. Buy two for the price of one. How that can be applied to religion I haven't yet figured out, but I have my ten marketing chimpanzees working day and night to come up with the right concept.

That's too close to the truth to be funny. Here in the USA, God is a businessman. The preachers and televangelists certainly are. Religion is a bargain, where you buy salvation, literally and figuratively. And God wants you to be rich. So the televangelists spout.

[bombadillo]

Originally Posted by Ljubomir

Interesting angle. I don't remember seeing the Religion-and-Fastfood combo in a few years. It just might do the trick.

The combo aspect is something American televangelists are intimately acquainted with, along with supersizing, and instant gratification. Americans want everything (the combo) -- material goodies now and a pleasant afterlife -- so that's what is sold to them: hey, pal, God wants you to be rich, plus you go to heaven when you're dead. Remember not to make an American choose, or engage in any sort of sacrifice and you'll be okay. Hmmm ... religion is sold like fast food, as is just about everything else.

[Gladstone]

Good points Plethon. Bin Laden does indeed have a whiff of Orwell's Goldstein concept about him...

...all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his [Goldstein's] teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

For any who might not remember, the super-state of Oceania in 1984 was the US-UK bloc.

War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting.

1984 Part 1 Chapter 1

1984 Part 2 Chapter 9

[Marcus Marulus]

Photo from new bin Laden video released

CAIRO, Egypt - A still photo released Tuesday from a new Osama bin Laden videotape shows one of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers, wearing a white turban, superimposed upon an image of a burning World Trade Center.

The videotape had not yet been posted on extremist web sites Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of the attacks. But the IntelCenter, a monitoring group in suburban Washington, said it had obtained the videotape privately and it released two still photos.

One showed bin Laden in front of a brown backdrop. The other showed one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Walid al-Shehri, in front of the picture of the Trade Center.

The IntelCenter also released a brief quote by bin Laden from the new tape in which he mentions the suicide hijacker, al-Shehri.

"This talk of mine consists of some reflections on the will of a young man who personally penetrated the most extreme degrees of danger and is a rarity among men: one of the 19 champions (may Allah have mercy on them all)," said bin Laden, according to the monitoring group.

[source]