What I actually saw was far more worrying: Osama bin Laden beating us at our own media game. With devilish cunning, he has plugged into the MTV generation - and it's clear he knows how to reach us. I have spent all day humming militant Islamic songs. And I am a Jewish twenty-something from New York.
He knows his audience. His most impressionable recruits are of the same age and sex as MTV's loyal following: alienated teenage boys, full of the resentment, hyperactivity and maddening sense of impotence that typify that age group - in any country. In the video, the oppressor is not parental authority, but the West, which can be blamed for everything.
Would that make him a sort of Middle Eastern Fred Durst then? (via 1.0)
Come on, that's a pretty feeble straw-man. The only people (other than Islamist extremists) who have vocally sided with the Taliban that I've seen have been the Spartacist, a fringe Marxist/Maoist sect who make the ordinary International Socialists look eminently sane and undogmatic.
I suppose in your world-view, those who question US foreign policy are cheering on the WTC bombers by doing so.
Seems to me the reviewer equates crappy 80s 'clock' 'windowshade' and 'diagonal' wipes with slick MTV production techniques. Maybe 80's MTV. It mentions an image splitting up and dividing into 9 smaller images. My god, sounds like someone got themselves the same 'My First Video Editor' as Lisa Simpson. Save us from the StarWipe of Retribution!
Uh... actually, here in my country (Spain) I have heard a fair number of people expressing their happiness about the U.S. finally "tasting its own medicine" (a graffiti on the street read "USA 0, rest of the world 3"). It's not an organized party or movement, but the feeling is definitely on the streets.
As for other examples, Hebe de Bonafini, the leader of the argentinan Mothers of the May Square (the organization of mothers looking for the people "missing" during the dictatorship) has publicly said that she "celebrated" the terrorist attacks: "there were no innocents in those buildings. That's where they decided who was going to die and starve in the rest of the world" (see http://www.elmundo.es/2001/10/12/espana/1058325.html with Babelfish) (admittedly, Bonafini has gone off the radical left deep end lately, and many members of her association disagree with her).
WHat's so "chilling" about it? After all, every right-thinking progressive person knows that Bin Laden is a hero in the fight against America's imperialistic domination, and anyone who calls him a "terrorist" is just a jingoistic war-monging redneck.
</SARCASM>