I knew Che Guevarra...and Osama Bin Laden is no Che Guevarra...Is he?

Great Debates
1

Are we being well governed?

The following from todays Times lays out some real world public relations problems that flow from Crawford Regijme policies.

 "Even among prosperous, upper-middle-class Saudis it is possible to hear support for such actions, especially after the string of events in the past month with the killing of two Hamas leaders in Gaza and President Bush's endorsement of Israeli plans to keep West Bank settlements and to prevent the long-cherished return of Palestinian refugees to Israel. Often the anger takes the form of endorsing Mr. bin Laden's calls for fighting the Americans.

“Young people are wearing T-shirts with bin Laden’s picture on them just the way people used to wear pictures of Che Guevara,” said Tufful al-Oqbi, a student at King Saud University. “It’s simply because he is the only one resisting. Even if we reject his methods, it’s because there is no other way, because this is the only way.”

Fowziyah Abukhalid, a sociology professor at the university, has noticed a parallel phenomenon among her students. "Many young women are saying My God, bin Laden is so charming,' or My God, bin Laden is so handsome,’ " she said. “He is politically appealing, that is why they view him as handsome.”

If 'sama looks like Che to these folks, we are in such deep shit…

And yet, (right-wing dopers this is for you) can it be that the lesson here is this:

The United States has become so widely and virulently loathed, that it is possible for a sizable number of people to confuse a murderous religious zealot with a giant whose sandals 'sama is not fit to unlatch.

What do you plan to do, vaporize the entire middle east?

Let me quote Oliver Cromwell. (roughly)

Bethink ye, gentlemen, by the Bowels of Christ, that ye may be in error!

(Maybe the world is trying to tell us something?)

(disclaimer:for those literal minded dopers who never heard of Lloyd Bentsen, Dan Quayle, or John F. Kennedy, no, I did’nt really know Che, and no, Che was not a friend of mine, but also, yes, 'sama is NO Che.)

2

Presumably and ostensibly, the reason why the invasion of Iraq is a part of the war on terror is that we will overcome this sort of phenomena by staying the course in Iraq.

So, I’d geuss that for many attack-Iraq-Bush-backers, this is either a non-issue, or all the more reason why we had to invade Iraq.

3

At the (very real) risk of provoking justifiable attacks of dry heaves in some dopers, one might ask,

how many deaths will it take…till too many people have died?

Are you willing to identify ANY point at which “staying the course” just piles up too many bodies?

4

also, (help me out here…) I don’t understand how “staying the course” until we crush utterly every outward manifestation of resistance makes us less loathed.

Less defied, maybe, but, I think, MORE loathed.

5

Che Guevara was a hero of yours? I considered him to be a vicious assassin that was working for the communist cause. Working for the downfall of democracy and all that. Like OBL, except Che had Castro’s government backing him.

Maybe your Mama should have bought you some comic books. The heroes in them would have been more worthy of worship than Che.

6

Well, we agree at least on one thing.

Without straying into the lush fields of defining “democracy”, I will only say this:

I heard a radio broadcast of Fidel Castro giving a speech at Riverside Cathedral once.

It made me cry.

I don’t speak spanish…

7

I had a girlfriend (age 14) at Pinar del Rio. She and her family were killed there by the Fidelistas.

That made me cry.

8

Imagine how you would have cried had you listened to Hitler.

9

My reply, obviously, addressed to alaricthegoth.

10

Um, aren’t we getting a little off-topic here, not to say Godwinized? I don’t think that even atg is claiming that bin Laden is really a hero worthy of emulation or admiration (in fact, he explicitly called him a “murderous religious zealot”, whatever one’s opinion of Che Guevara may be.

Rather, the question seems to be: If many moderate ME Muslims are now saying that they feel at least some support for bin Laden “[e]ven if we reject his methods, it’s because there is no other way, because this is the only way”, what should we do to defuse that support? Are the current Administration’s strategies being counterproductive by fueling anti-US Muslim hostility?

11

Lots of Muslims hate America.

Perhaps they are all misguided, but they really do hate America.

Perhaps they are misled by Osama bin Laden, but they really do hate America.

Perhaps our government is really motivated only by a love for democracy, but lots of Muslims really hate America.

Perhaps Che Guevera was a self serving opportunistic demagogue with a gun. But lots of Latin Americans really hated the CIA, and Anglo America.

For a lot of people, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And we are their enemy.

We will continue to be their enemy until they decide we are not.

You see, you get to choose your own enemies. You don’t always get to choose your friends.

Tomahawk missiles and smart bombs are limited in their ability to enhance friendships, but they are excellent in producing enemies.

Killing does not produce lasting friendships. It certainly can produce abiding hatred.

And the war is never over, until the looser decides it is over.

Unless we decide to kill everyone, and keep killing everyone, until all the survivors love us.

Tris

12

The OP chose the thread title and in it he makes it plain that he thinks highly of Che Guevara. If he had titled his thread: “Yet another everything American is bad and Bush sucks thread”, I wouldn’t have opened it.

By alaricthegoth: “The United States has become so widely and virulently loathed, that it is possible for a sizable number of people to confuse a murderous religious zealot with a giant whose sandals 'sama is not fit to unlatch.”

Clearly, the OP thinks Che was a “Giant”.
By :alricthegoth: "
“Young people are wearing T-shirts with bin Laden’s picture on them just the way people used to wear pictures of Che Guevara,”

The only people I remember wearing T-shirts with Che’s picture on them were pseudo revolutionaries at a few elitist colleges in the States. With them it was the In Thing to glamorize anything anti-establishment. They wouldn’t have been able to recognize a bullet, rape or torture unless they happened to fall into Che’s hands.

13

Let’s see how deep are we. Che assisted Castro to take over a Carribee island. Was made a minister of something and then nudged out to go make revolutions somewhere else. Went to Bolivia, talked to campesinos, was ratted out and promptly killed on a spot. No, we are not that deep. We are much deeper. I wish Osama was dispatched that quickly.

14

I dunno, but I try to approach it logically. Presumably “the only way” is to blow up infidels as a solution to all ME internal political and social troubles. Well, may be every time we have an internal political snafu like ‘Election 2000’ we should nuke some Muslims?

15

NI: Presumably “the only way” is to blow up infidels as a solution to all ME internal political and social troubles.

“Internal” troubles? I thought that what the Saudi student whom I quoted was saying was that their goal is to resist US interference and domination—which I presume they’d consider more of an “external” trouble—and that even though they reject bin Laden’s “blowing up” innocents, they have no other way effectively to resist the US.

We may not see the problem the same way as these students do, but I think the point of the thread was: if so many Muslims do see it this way, how can we effectually change their perspective? Military aggression doesn’t seem to be very successful so far in persuading them that we’re not actually out to get them.

16

We can interpret the quote in a few different ways, of course.

ObL was certainly trying to capitalize on ME internal troubles. The simple reality of US airbase nearby doesn’t lead to terrorism (in Japan and Germany and other places, for example).

Of course, student’s words can be interpreted in two ways. May be he didn’t really mean that “the only way” is to blow up people. May be he meant that “the only way” is to wear ObL T-shirts.

17

Osama can be already considered a hero, for fighting back the USSR, after the Soviets were steamrolling other countries for 35 straight years after WW2, only to be stalled twice by American forces.

If he stopped there, he would had his choice of which Arab country to takeover, and America would probably bankroll the takeover. But he decided to get permanently pissed over Saudi Arabia choosing America over him and his forces during Gulf War 1. Now, if by a miracle he pulled it off and defeat America, by what terms he defines as victory, he can be, unfortunately, considered an all-timer.

The Arabs would think, “One of our own defeating the two superpowers? Wow! Who would have thought what am Arab of all people can do?”. Or course Osama has cult status.

18

Yes…But those airbases in Japan and Germany aren’t there helping to prop up some fairly corrupt and repressive regimes who we are making nicey-nice with because we want their natural resources.

19

Sorry about your girlfriend. On the other hand, you have to recognize the fact that the Batista regime that preceded Castro’s was not so great either. It was repressive, corrupt, and allowed great plunder of Cuba’s wealth at the hands of foreign corporations along with a very select group of the lucky Cubans who got a share of the action.

Of course, this doesn’t justify having another brutal regime take its place. However, it does help us understand the slogan, “If you want peace, work for justice!” If we had done more to prevent what happened under Batista from occurring (or at least not aided and abetted it, we may have been able to prevent the conditions under which someone like Castro could gain power).

20

jshore: It all seems so very long ago. Her cousins lived next door to me in Miami. She and her brother would visit often. On our first “date” I took her to a dance. She was 12 and I was 13. In the custom of the time, if you took a Cuban girl out, a male relative had to go along. So her brother went. Time passed, her visits to Miami came and went, and I went to visit her in Cuba three times.

In 1958, everybody in Havana cound speak english. Cab drivers, waiters, people on the street could all speak english. Then on my last trip there, Castro had taken over and all at once, Nobody could speak english!

Young teenagers don’t pay much attention to politics. I guess I knew that things were changing, but I didn’t pay much attention as I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. At night down there, she and I would slip outside and make out while the harsh rattle-rattle of the adult males arguing politics in cuban served as our background music.

Then one day her cousin, my next door neighbor, said that her family would be moving to Miami permanently in a little while. Then another day he came and told me that they had all been killed. Because they were of the wrong class or something like that. It didn’t make any sense to me.

I know the Batista regime was corrupt. That doesn’t excuse the murders, robberies and rapes of entire families that were committed by Che Guevara and others like him that were acting under Castro’s orders.

Bottom line, I’m not going to read a message board on which a poster says a ruthless murderer like Guevara was a hero without objecting.