Posted on 12/14/2001 3:44:23 PM PST by Pokey78
THE Daily Telegraph is pleased to present a worldwide panel of experts with the latest in-depth analysis of the new Osama bin Laden tape:
Muhammad al-Gamei'a, Egyptian imam, live from Cairo: We know very well that Mossad is behind this video. Only the Jews are capable of pulling off a stunt like this.
The brilliant audio quality. The lighting. The professional camera work. Our Muslim camcorders won't have that kind of technological capability for another 200 years.
John Pilger, veteran war correspondent, live in studio: Thanks, Mark. Great to be here. To help me identify the guys behind this tape, please welcome the guys behind me!
My good friends, the Guardian Tabernacle Choir, accompanied by the New Statesman Sympathy Orchestra, with George Monbiot on snare drum. We'd like to do a medley of the only song in our act. So take it away, professor (that's Noam Chomsky):
You got to ac-cen-tchu-ate the negative
E-lim-i-nate the positive
Latch on to all the paranoid
Don't mess with Mister In Between
You got to ask yourself who has the most to gain
Ask yourself who's the least to gain
Figure out just who benefits
It's always the US war machine
To illustrate
The stuff we check
Mention Vietnam
Bring up Mossadeq
That's what we do
Just when ev'rything looks a wreck
Man, we say you gotta
Ac-cen-tchu-ate the negative
E-lim-i-nate the positive
Latch on to all the paranoid
Don't mess with Mister In Between!
One mo' time!
Robert Fisk, foreign correspondent, the Independent, hanging upside down in Madam Fatima's Discipline Parlour, Beirut: I was struck, quite literally - ow! - by the very unIslamic tone of the purported - aargh! - confession. That cowboy imagery about "a strong horse and a weak horse" hit me immediately - aaaai-eeeee!
Thanks - as less Saudi sounding and more Texan. Also that obsession with death, dying, killing all seems entirely foreign to the life-affirming culture of militant Islamism I know so well and smacks more - yarrooooo! a little lower, please - of the Texas penal system.
Furthermore, though they appear to say "Allah be praised" continually, if you rewind - aaaaaaaaaaargh! that's too tight - and turn it up, it's clear that they're really saying, "Al'll be Prez".
It's obvious this is a year-old video of Dick Cheney, Jim Baker and George Bush Sr sitting around in false beards kicking around - uuuuuurgh! - ideas on how to steal the presidency from Gore.
Yvonne Ridley, author of Yvonne Ridley's Diary, live from the Ivy: This is conclusive proof of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan caused by the bloody Yanks' useless bombing campaign.
I mean, flamin' Nora, would you go to a bash at Osama's? No booze, no fags, no music, everyone sitting around on old beanbags boring on about their dreams. And no chance of a UN relief convoy getting through with the chilled Chardonnay and hors d'oeuvres before winter sets in.
The dull bloke on the right? Oh, I got stuck next to him the first night in Kandahar, just my luck. I pull up on the donkey figuring I'll crash the party, no problem. So I say to him: "Where do I park my ass?" And he says: "In the extra-large burqa, infidel harlot." Bloody hilarious, I don't think.
Mullah Omar, interior decorator, live from Tora Bora: This video is obviously faked by the CIA. As I learnt from your filthy Jew tabloids, Osama has a very small penis. That's why he always undresses down the dark end of the cave.
That's why his ex-wife says in your Mirror that he wants to blow up Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower. That's why he feels the need to keep penetrating deeper and deeper into the mountain.
I know this stuff. We get Dr Ruth on Radio Peshawar. Yet the man on the video has a pronounced bulge in his robes. My best guess would be Tom Jones. Whoops, he's coming back. And it's my turn to saute the scorpions.
Simon Wilson, communications director, the Tate Gallery, live from London: Well, it was a late entry, but the Turner judges were particularly taken by Osama's almost playful approach to contemporary notions of slaughter and horror.
Although he's previously worked with rubble, in his first home video the gleeful attitude to mass murder poses a profound challenge to fundamental societal attitudes about what's funny.
Okay, I know you Telegraph types will say it's just ugly and destructive, but he's actually immensely spiritual when you talk to him about it. He's worked in construction, he's worked in deconstruction, he's edgy, dangerous, explosive, but rarely so in your face.
I did ask him to come to London but he says he's holed up in a cave dodging daisycutters with a one-eyed mullah and a lame goatherd who gets a faraway look in his eyes every time the radio mentions the $25 million reward.
I said: "Do I hear next year's installation, or what!" Then there was a big noise and the line went dead.
Bloody hilarious I Do think.
Quote:
What do I think about all this? Well, first I think that the directors of the Tate Gallery, which receives funding from general taxation, should be locked up in prison and made to do hard labor scraping the rust off bolts for 20 years or so with nothing to eat but cold oatmeal porridge. Then I think Mr. Creed should be stripped naked, sprayed all over with bright blue paint, and made to run round and round Piccadilly Circus until he drops from exhaustion, after which he should be killed by some not-very-humane method. Then the Tate Gallery should be reduced to rubble by aerial bombardment, the rubble carted away to be used as landfill, and the ground sown with salt. Then the fools who pay good money to look at this "art" should be packed into boxcars and tipped off the white cliffs of Dover, and their mangled corpses left to be feasted on by dogs, crows and crabs.Oh, all right: In a free country, people should be left alone to ingest dog poop, if that's what they want to do. Cancel the boxcars.
And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist," in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded of him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode -- and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture . . . and came out the other side as Art Theory! . . . Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word.
Thanks, Pokey. I laughed ten solid minutes at this line. Steyn is amazing.
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