http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Rea...e.asp?ID=21006


Osama's Pen Pal


FrontPageMagazine
1/24/2006
Daniel Pipes


William Blum, a Washington, D.C. writer, responded delightedly last
Thursday on learning that Osama bin Laden had cited his book in an
audiotape. Blum called the mention of Rogue State: A Guide to the
World's Only Superpower "almost as good as being an Oprah book," a
reference to the popular American television host whose endorsement
routinely makes a book a bestseller.


Asked if he was queasy about bin Laden's urging listeners to read his

book, Blum replied: "I'm not repulsed, and I'm not going to pretend
I
am." Quite the contrary, he said: "I'm glad-It's good publicity for
my
book." And, indeed, it was: Thanks to bin Laden's promotion, Rogue
State ascended from 205,763 to 26 on Amazon.com's ranking of
most-ordered books.


Blum explained his response by saying he found bin Laden no worse than
the U.S. government: "I would not say that bin Laden has been any less
moral than Washington has been." He even refused to distance himself
from bin Laden's views: "If he shares with me a deep dislike for
certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy, then I'm not going to spurn
any endorsement of the book by him. I think it's good that he shares
those views."


Blum describes his life mission as "slowing down the American
Empire...injuring the beast." Not surprisingly, Noam Chomsky, Oliver
Stone, Gore Vidal, and their ilk have lavished praise on his work.


What attracted bin Laden to Blum? This passage (which actually comes
from another of Blum's books, titled Freeing the World to Death:
Essays on the American Empire): "If I were the [U.S.] president, I
could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days.
Permanently. I would first apologize - very publicly and very
sincerely - to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the
tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American
imperialism."


Until his sudden catapult into the public eye, Blum, 72, had lived the
quiet life of a second-string America-hater. The child of Polish
Jewish immigrants, he grew up in Brooklyn, studied accounting in
college, and, as an anti-Communist with aspirations to become a
foreign service officer, he went to work at a computer-related
position in the U.S. Department of State in the mid-1960s. The Vietnam
War radicalized him, and he resigned from State in 1967 to pursue a
career of far-Left advocacy and sabotage. (He claims to have revealed
the names and addresses of over two hundred CIA operatives.) For
nearly forty years, Blum has written op-eds, after articles, after
books pursuing his hobbyhorse to prove the alleged evil of the U.S.
government officials, whom he has compared to "chainsaw baby killers."


He goes so far as to state the existence of an American-sponsored
"holocaust" since 1945 that has caused the death of a few million
people and condemned many more millions to "lives of misery and
torture." David Horowitz, a foremost analyst of the Left, sums up this
line of thought in his excellent study, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam
and the American Left (Regnery): for Blum, "America is worse than Nazi
Germany." Horowitz also notes that "there is no discernible
difference" between Blum's view of the U.S. role in the Cold War and
the crudest Communist caricature manufactured in the Kremlin.


Although Blum was childishly delighted by his sudden celebrity and
riches, his comrades on the far-Left reacted more warily to bin
Laden's endorsement, aware how it reveals that, as Cliff Kincaid of
Accuracy in Media puts it, "bin Laden is counting on a [leftist] fifth
column in the U.S. to undermine the war on terrorism and hand him a
victory on the battlefield."


Such exposure so worries some on the far-Left that they have gone so
far as to portray the bin Laden audiotape to be "an obvious fake"
concocted by neo-conservatives in the U.S. government. But elaborate
conspiracy theories cannot undo the fact that the Islamist-leftist
alliance, burgeoning for years, has now reached the point that the
far-Left constitutes al-Qaeda's new mujahideen.


After having failed to mount a massive terrorist operation in the
United States in over four years, bin Laden's early but very public
Valentine to the far-Left suggests that he sees it as a critical ally.
And he is entirely correct to do so.


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