A senator praises bin Laden?
How dare she. How dare Patty Murray, Washington state’s senior senator, heap praise upon Osama bin Laden, while condemning her own country.
That’s exactly what the Democratic lawmaker did in recent — underreported — remarks to a gathering of high school honor students in Vancouver, Wash.
“Osama bin Laden has been very, very effective,” she informed the youngsters, according to an article in the Vancouver Columbian newspaper. “We’ve got to ask, why is this man so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries?”
Murray, who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee during the last session of Congress, offered her explanation for why the man responsible for the 2001 terror attacks on Washington and New York is — supposedly — so beloved.
“He’s been out in these countries for decades,” she explained, “building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. It made their lives better.”
Meanwhile, said Murray, the United States hasn’t been nearly as generous as bin Laden, the mass murderer, who slaughtered more than 3,000 men, women and children at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in the Pennsylvania countryside. We haven’t been out in many of those countries helping them build infrastructure, she said.
Well here’s a news flash for Murray, the blame-America-first liberal: bin Laden is hardly the selfless humanitarian she portrayed. To the extent that he’s built roads and other infrastructure, it has been to facilitate the terrorist training and related activities of his Al Qaeda organization. He’s built schools to indoctrinate young Arabs to hate Americans (and Israelis).
As for bin Laden building day care facilities, well he certainly hasn’t built that many, if any at all. For in Arab nations boasting fundamentalist governments — like Afghanistan under the Taliban — women aren’t allowed in the workplace, so there’s no need for day care. Murray says that bin Laden’s generosity made life better for people in Afghanistan and other nations that provided him refuge. Yet, in May 2001, she was one of 13 senators who sent a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell urging the Bush administration to provide additional emergency aid to Afghanistan to avert a humanitarian crisis of “massive proportions.”
“The conditions in temporary camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan are horrendous,” the letter lamented, “and people are dying daily from starvation, cold and disease.” So much for bin Laden’s largess.
While Murray claimed that the United States hasn’t “been there helping” the suffering Afghan people, the fact is that the Bush administration provided Afghanistan $173 million in aid in 2001 — much of it, in fact, while the Taliban was still in power. For the administration felt compassion for the Afghan people, though it was understandably wary of the government in Kabul, though it was understandably concerned that the Taliban regime was providing a safe haven for bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist organization.
Murray, the former school teacher who was first elected to the Senate in 1992 — Washington voters fancied the idea of being represented by the so-called “mom in tennis shoes” — cannot understand why her flattering remarks about bin Laden have provoked so much sound and fury. Her words implied that America’s politicians and citizens somehow brought last year’s terror attacks upon themselves.
And one needn’t be an extremist to be offended by the Washington senator’s flattering remarks about bin Laden. For there is nothing positive that can or should be said about an evildoer who has the blood of more than 3,000 innocents on his hands.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)