Jihad Chic posted by Richard Seymour

If The Guardian wanted to send some of its reactionary opponents into a furore, it couldn't have done much better than putting Osama Bin Laden's latest speech in their Comment pages . Apparently, Mark Steel was too much of a nutter for them , but this guy's alright. Can we expect The Al Qaeda Reader next year? A hefty book of collected articles and speeches on the lies of the Zionist-Christian Crusaders and their morally degenerate lifestyles? Maybe a couple of fitness videos featuring Osama and his acolytes doing leg stretches while reciting the Prophets?

I suppose I'm asking the wrong question - what I should ask is why has a bumpkin billionaire with a few nuts loose and a monomaniac fixation with the Great Satan and its Zionist imp got the ears of anyone at all? Go and have a read of the column - it's mindless drivel. Not merely crackpot, but actually incoherent and stylistically rather dull. Couldn't the sub-editors have done something about this? Thrown in a few jokes maybe? Like:

Osama: Man walks into a bar... BOOOM!!

Mullah Omar: Praise be!

That sort of thing.

His image is now printed on t-shirts, his face colonising hearts and minds faster than Paul Bremer can say "we got 'im!" like the jumped up little twerp he is. He's a demented, murderous, fanatical Che Guevara with an Old Testament beard. This poetaster of Jihad chic has only done one thing to 'merit' this attention - carrying out the PR for an organisation that was apparently able, once, to deal a massive blow to America's land mass. Now, I'm not going all Hitchens on it, (haven't had enough drink yet). The temporary PR successes of "Islamo-fascism" or whatever you want to call it don't give anyone the right to impugn the antiwar movement's pedigree. There is no chance whatsoever that the almighty upsurge of protest against US imperialism was either informed by anti-Americanism and anti-semitism, or rooted genetically in it, or making any arguments predicated on it.

In fact, my argument is rather the reverse. It was the vacancy of the international Left which allowed these piratical fuckwits to gain a foothold, first in the Middle East, then elsewhere. The dynamic is almost an exact replica of the process which saw the resurgence of the European far right. The mainstream left and right colluding in a sort of depoliticisation through the Nineties, the demonstrably baleful aspects of capitalism becoming even more obsence, the political process even more moribund than ever, centre-left governments concealing their failure behind a facade of identity politics, PC radicalism, and a multicultural discourse that is not only useless, but actually beneficial for the far right. Multiculturalism, promoting the politics of 'difference' rather than universal human rights, can produce strange ideological effects.

On the latter point, consider Nick Griffin's cosmopolitan delights:

"There's a limited number of benefits [of immigration]. The one which everyone always points to is curry. I like curry. I eat in Indian restaurants."

If the BNP leader can appropriate this language, it obviously doesn't assist much in the struggle against fascist resurgence.

In world politics, we have had the Free World led by a lachrymose rapist with an easy smile while he bombs aspirin factories in Sudan , hotels in Iraq and villagers in Afghanistan. Protests were minimal. The mainstream left even approved of some of these gestures, or at least mounted little dissent. Until anticapitalist protests rocked the advanced capitalist world from 1999, the Left was considered mute and moot. The result was a political vacuum in which arseholes with a paranoid world-view and a self-righteous fanaticism could thrive. But enough about Tony Blair.

I'm sick of a situation where Osama bin Laden gets in the Comment Pages of The Guardian, and yet only the Willesden Herald is willing to acknowledge my obvious genius. And that, comrades, is why the left has got to get its shit together, run Bush and Blair out of government, overthrow capitalism, toss the leaders of Al Qaeda into a volcano, and establish socialism and inexpensive love.