News Brief

Osama bin Laden rebuked a former Jewish adviser to President Bush for comparing the threat of Islamist terrorism to the Holocaust. In his latest video, the al-Qaida leader cites Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, who wrote of the terrorist threat in 2004: “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” Bin Laden called this “unjust” and said in his video released last week and addressed to Americans, “The morality and culture of the Holocaust is your culture, not our culture. In fact, burning living beings is forbidden in our religion, even if they be small like the ant, so what of man. The Holocaust of the Jews was carried out by your brethren in the middle of Europe; but had it been closer to our countries, most of the Jews would have been saved by taking refuge with us. And my proof for that is in what your brothers, the Spanish, did when they set up the horrible courts of the Inquisition to try Muslims and Jews, when the Jews only found safe shelter by taking refuge in our countries. And that is why the Jewish community in Morocco today is one of the largest communities in the world. They are alive with us and we have not incinerated them, but we are a people who don’t sleep under oppression and reject humiliation and disgrace, and we take revenge on the people of tyranny and aggression, and the blood of the Muslims will not be spilled with impunity, and the morrow is nigh for he who awaits.” Morocco’s Jewish population is less than 20,000 and has been targeted in recent years by al-Qaida.