Reason Two: Oddly enough, economics. Bin Laden shares with much of the rest of the world a lack of understanding of the meaning of wealth. He does not know that wealth is a property, not a thing. To the extent he and his followers think about such things at all, they do not know that money is an action, not an object. They do not know that value is an opinion and that price is knowledge; these are not objective qualities inherent in a thing. And that makes a difference.
In this world view, during the Caliphate, Arabs and Muslims owned a disproportionately large share of the wealth in the world, which is as it should be. Then came the Crusades – which still continue today, by the way – and the armies of the West came and stole the wealth belonging to its rightful owners, Arabs and Muslims. This, and this alone, is the reason that the West, including America (which didn’t exist when the Crusades began, but never mind), is now wealthy and prosperous, and the people of the Middle East are poor and powerless. Al-Qaida’s campaign, then, is meant both to kill unbelievers and to restore their stolen wealth to its rightful owners, defined naturally enough as Al-Qaida’s members and cooperating groups, who are the only true believers in the One True God.
All that is clear from, again, the fatwa, which explains:
“The Arabian Peninsula has never--since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas--been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies now spreading in it like locusts, consuming its riches and destroying its plantations. All this is happening at a time when nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food.â€
This claim is made even more difficult to accept, as I have said, coming from a Saudi, the beneficiary of so much American money poured into the Kingdom to pay for its oil. But if you believe that wealth is fixed, then it is clear that the West can only be more prosperous than others because it is extracting their wealth without giving a fair return. Bin Laden has written, “As a result of the policy imposed on the country, especially in the field of oil industry where production is restricted or expanded and prices are fixed to suit the American economy ignoring the economy of the country.†He truly believes that all the billions of dollars pumped into Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States were an underpayment for the true value of the oil. After all, most people in those countries are still underprivileged and poor, and most people in America and the West, according to his standards, live in wealth and decadence.
The idea that wealth is created by human action, by the workings of a free market, is not only inconceivable to these people, it is blasphemy. It implies that humans can create something, when their faith insists that only Allah can create.
Put in the terms I have used, it seems absurd to believe that the wealth of the world is a fixed sum. Yet precisely that belief is the basis of the economic policies of many countries. For instance, the confiscatory tariffs and restrictive investment policies in Asian countries like India are based on the belief that making a profit on an investment is stealing wealth from the host country. It is the same idea as that of the presidential campaign of H. Ross Perot, who said that any job created in Mexico by the Free Trade Agreement was a job lost in America.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=1917
