Six years after 9/11

To many in the Arab and Islamic worlds, trapped in poverty and ignorance and fed a bundle of conspiracy theories by rulers anxious to divert attention from their own failures and excesses, Osama bin Laden must appear a hero, a character akin to Zorro or Robin Hood, swooping in to tweak the beards of tyrants and oppressors previously believed invulnerable.

The image doesn’t quite fit, of course. The heroes of folklore rarely murdered women and children and other non-combatants indiscriminately and en masse. And their demands were rarely, well … nuts.

Presumably still lying low in a rocky corner of the Afghan-Pakistani border occupied by jealous tribal clans and famously inaccessible to outsiders, bin Laden resurfaced this week to mark the anniversary of his most successful explosion of murders to date, the hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001.

Two videos were to be released, the first containing enough topical references to convince observers that it was made in recent months. The second video will present the taped “last will and testament” of one of the Sept. 11 hijack killers, al-Qaida announced Monday.

In the first video — bin Laden’s first appearance in three years, released over the weekend — the homicidal maniac calmly instructed Americans that if they want to be spared further attacks by this self-appointed avenging angel, we must abandon capitalism and convert to Islam.

If we could lose sight of the screaming wounded and the smoldering corpses of al-Qaida’s thousands of innocent victims, along with the billions of dollars re-directed to this war which could otherwise have gone to clothe the poor and feed the hungry — which we cannot — it would be almost funny.

If this were some Monty Python sketch, the president of the United States might respond that we will stop hunting down bin Laden and his personal equivalent of the Manson family if he will only invest all his money in shares of Anheuser-Busch and Jimmy Dean Pork Sausages, get a sex change operation and finish out his years as a Las Vegas pole dancer.

Those demands would make about as much sense.

Islam won a lot of converts by the sword — a thousand years ago. The Conquistadores used many of the same techniques in this hemisphere — 500 years ago.

But most of mankind has moved on. Alternatives to the freedom to work and buy and sell, to believe and worship and move and marry as we please, have been tried, and have failed — after their adherents murdered millions in the attempt.

Just as the struggle of the Plains Indians to hold back the tide of European settlement was doomed by their dependence on those very same white men for the knives, guns, textiles and cook-pots they themselves never learned to make, so is the foredoomed nature of bin Laden’s “jihad” revealed by his very choice of tools — were his jet airliners and high-speed Spanish trains and video-cassette recorders invented and manufactured anywhere between Tripoli and Islamabad?

Though his persistence is exasperating, it’s not clear how much power and effectiveness bin Laden retains. One of the top lieutenants shown in earlier videos — Mohammed Atef — was killed in a November 2001 U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan. Another — Ramzi Binalshibh — was captured in 2002.

In the end, he is far more potent as a symbol than as a “commander” whose forces must sneak about using false identities … and whose ability to strike these shores has been notably lacking for years.

This is, at heart, a war of ideas — ideas that must stand the test of time. Our ideas have given us the richness, the diversity, the burgeoning hopes and aspirations of the Western World.

Osama bin Laden calls for the hard-working and happy offspring of that world to instead embrace the dark and repressive ideas that have rendered so much of the Arab world an example of backwardness, oppression and corruption.

Good luck.