America’s least favorite filmmaker offers some thoughts on the targeted killing of 9/11 mastermind and leader of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden:
For nine years I wrote and I said that Osama bin Laden was not hiding in a cave. I’m not a cave expert, I was just using my common sense. He was a multimillionaire crime boss (using religion as his cover), and those guys just don’t live in caves. He had people killed under the guise of religion, and not many in the media bothered to explain that every time Osama referenced Islam, he wasn’t really quoting Islam. Just because Osama said he was a “Muslim” didn’t make it so. Yet he was called a Muslim by everyone. If a crazy person started running around mass-killing people, and he did so while wearing a Wal-Mart blazer and praising Wal-Mart, we wouldn’t automatically call him a Wal-Mart leader or say that Wal-Mart was the philosophy behind his killings, would we?
Well, Michael, we certainly wouldn’t. But would you?
Oh, wait–you did… except when you did it, you were blaming Kmart, not WalMart, which is, of course, totally different and okay. *dripping with sarcasm*
Mr. Moore, hypocrisy is thy name.
I agree that it is wrong to blame every Muslim for what Osama bin Laden did, or even what his lieutenants and foot soldiers did. It is non-sensical to blame a religion in general–an abstract metaphysical and ethical construct as depicted in ancient literature–when in reality, other conditions explained in social science literature have more to do with attracting people to terrorism. It’s equally as non-sensical to implicate Kmart in the deranged slayings of high school students by members of the Trenchcoat Mafia.
And please: don’t pretend that you don’t have any broad brushes in your painter’s kit, when that’s how you’ve made your own millions.
Hat tip: Cory Doctorow, who disappointingly call’s Moore’s rant “a tremendous essay on the larger significance of the assassination of ObL…“
