RTFA: http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=78524&ne…

Mar 19 – A new audio message allegedly from Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden appears on the internet.
The Al Qaeda leader threatens the European Union with grave punishment over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad recently re-published in the Danish media. Bin Laden says the cartoons are part of a “crusade” which he’s linked to Pope Benedict.

Fascinating video, apparently produced by Bin Laden. In it, he declares that Islam is the superior law, when compared with … well, I don’t know what he’s comparing it to. See, the situation is complicated… Bin Laden claims that laws governing speech don’t protect any speech that would violate the laws of Islam.

I suppose that in the United States, we have a British-style common law system that aggregates and synthesizes historical precedent. This is combined with federal, state, and local republics, whose representatives are subject to popular vote. Each element in this shared historical catalog legal precedents is traceable, ultimately to its philosophical roots, which may have originated several millennia prior. At first glance, it seems like speech laws originated centuries before Islam.

Of course, that’s not a satisfying reason to dismiss Bin Laden’s remarks. Bin Laden points out a number of moral failures of the political machine that runs the US, UK, EU, and others. By showing that the system contains contradictory elements, he concludes that the system is failed and, by default, is therefore inferior to Islam.

So, we have a political system that simultaneously:

1) condones free speech
2) commits massacres

On the basis of 2 being unquestionably wrong, Bin Laden concludes that the system is also wrong on point 1. From the US perspective, the big difference between 1 and 2 is that the “people” are generally in favor of 1, but the people are generally opposed to 2. I think most people want to change 2, but want to keep 1.

The battle over religious pictures has been fought before. It was called The Great Schism, which had its roots in Iconoclasm. If you don’t recognize the word, iconoclasm means “to ban pictures.” That’s right – a multi-century war was fought between the 8th and 11th centuries inside the Catholic Church, ending with the entire machine splitting in half. It started with pictures, and it started when someone took a hilarious, unnecessarily extreme stance towards those pictures.

On this basis, I conclude that this Bin Laden video is just another TROLL. The authenticity of this video hasn’t been confirmed by anyone I trust, so this might just be another state-sponsored prank. The very notion that images would be a greater problem than massacres is so stupidly extreme, it might as well have been said by Rush Limbaugh.

The video is designed to rile up a bunch of people who seem to care about speech, and who love to flame a troll. Conveniently, someone has been fanning the fires of a particularly viral stand alone complex: Anonymous.

…let me just say:

IT’S A TRAP.

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS.

HERE BE DRAGONS.