DUBAI, 24 April 2006 — Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden said the West’s shunning of the Hamas-led Palestinian government showed it was waging a “Crusader-Zionist war” on Muslims, according to an audiotape attributed to him and aired yesterday.
People in the West share responsibility for their countries’ “war against Islam,” said the speaker, who sounded like Bin Laden, on the tape broadcast on Al Jazeera television.
He said the Darfur crisis in western Sudan and Western efforts to isolate the Palestinian government since Hamas won January elections were part of this campaign.
“Their rejection of Hamas affirms that it is a Crusader-Zionist war against Muslims,” Bin Laden said.
In the brief excerpts of the tape that Al Jazeera aired, he did not repeat his assertion in an audiotape issued in January that Al-Qaeda was preparing attacks in the United States but was open to a conditional truce with Americans.
But his remarks about the complicity of Westerners in the policies of their governments appeared to be an argument that they were fair game for revenge attacks by militants.
The Al-Qaeda leader, on the run since the US campaign to oust Afghanistan’s Taleban government in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks, said Western leaders had ignored his truce offers.
“They do not want a truce unless it is from our side only ... they insist on continuing their Crusader campaign against our nation and to loot our wealth,” Bin Laden said.
Bin Laden also called for boycotting the United States and European countries over the controversial cartoons lampooning Islam’s Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) first published by a Danish newspaper.
