Dubai: Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden
lectured the US and other industrial nations on climate
change, and urged a dollar boycott in response to American
"slavery," in a fresh verbal assault broadcast on Friday.
In the message aired on Al-Jazeera television,
possibly timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum in
Davos, bin Laden said "all industrial nations, mainly the big
ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming."
"Discussing climate change is not an intellectual
luxury, but a reality," he said in the audio recording whose
authenticity could not be immediately verified.
"This is a message to the whole world about those who
are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and
what we should do about that."
The al-Qaeda chief condemned the administration of
former US president George W Bush for refusing to sign the
Kyoto protocol on cutting carbon emissions.
"Bush... and the Congress before him, rejected this
agreement, only to satisfy the big companies," said bin Laden.
"Those (firms) are behind speculation and monopolies,
and rises in prices... and they are behind globalisation and
its tragic results."
Bin Laden also slammed financial bailouts set up by
wealthy countries to help big industry cope with the global
financial crisis, saying the programmes helped companies that
caused the economic meltdown.
"When those perpetrators fall victims to the evil they
had committed, the heads of states rush to rescue them using
public money.
He also borrowed from prominent American leftist Noam
Chomsky, saying the US administration operates like the mafia.
"Chomsky was right when he pointed to a resemblance
between American policies and the approach of mafia gangs.
Those are the real terrorists," said bin Laden.
He was apparently referring to comments made in
British newspaper The Guardian in November by Chomsky, a
linguistics professor famous for his attacks on US policy.
The al-Qaeda leader went on to urge a boycott of the
US dollar.
"We should stop using the dollar and get rid of it...
I know that there would be huge repercussions for that, but
this would be the only way to free humankind from slavery...
to America and its companies," he said.
"Whatever the repercussions of such (boycott) decision
would be, staying in slavery to them would have bigger and
more dangerous results."
The broadcast came less than a week after bin Laden
praised as a "hero" Nigerian national Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab who allegedly tried to detonate explosives on a
US plane approaching Detroit on Christmas Day, in another
audio message.
PTI
First Published: Friday, January 29, 2010, 21:59