Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden recently took a break from planning terrorist attacks and encouraging suicide bombers to blast the United States and other developed nations for "the global warming crisis" and to call for a worldwide boycott of American products and the U.S. dollar.
""Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury--the phenomenon is an actual fact," said bin Laden, according to a report on the English-language Web site run by Al Jazeera, which released the full audiotape on Friday [January 29, 2010]. "All of the industrialized countries . . . bear responsibility for the global warming crisis." Obama singled out the United States for failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty that was established in 1997 and later ratified by 187 other nations. After calling on the global economy to boycott American goods and abandon American currency, bin Laden summed up by saying: "I am certain that such actions will have grave repercussions and huge impact." Earlier in the week, bin Laden had another message for the world. In that previous audiotape, bin Laden praised the attempt to crash an airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day, and he promised more terrorist attacks against the United States unless U.S. President Barack Obama takes steps to resolve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Neither Al Jazeera nor U.S. intelligence services could confirm whether the voice on the tape was really Osama bin Laden, so there's some chance that the message may be a hoax. If not, then the terrorist leader complaining about U.S. handling of environmental issues is a little like Prohibition kingpin Al Capone chastising the FBI for leaving the lights on. It doesn't really matter whether the message is justified in some sense, in this case "shooting the messenger" seems like the right idea. Sorry, Osama. If you plan, finance and carry out the murders of hundreds of innocent Americans--and repeatedly announce your intention to murder more--then you lose the right to offer us constructive criticism. That's just the way it goes.