Great Moments In Headlines

From AP: “Bin Laden blasts US for climate change.”

Fortunately, this time at least, it’s merely a rhetorical explosion:

Osama bin Laden sought to draw a wider public into his fight against the United States in a new message Friday, dropping his usual talk of religion and holy war and focusing instead on an unexpected topic: global warming.The al-Qaida leader blamed the United States and other industrialized nations for climate change and said the only way to prevent disaster was to break the American economy, calling on the world to boycott U.S. goods and stop using the dollar.

“The effects of global warming have touched every continent. Drought and deserts are spreading, while from the other floods and hurricanes unseen before the previous decades have now become frequent,” bin Laden said in the audiotape, aired on the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera.

Remember back in the late 1990s, when numerous wags noted how similar Al Gore’s rhetoric sounded to the writings of the equally anti-technology Unabomber? As El Rushbo notes*, “Bin Laden Joins Algore’s Team, Becomes an Environmentalist”, adding, “I wonder who’s gonna break to the news to the guy that it’s water vapor?”

Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote on September 11th, 2003,  “9/11 revealed an emerging geopolitical reality: that the world’s most important fault line is not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it.”

“Freud called it displacement,” Julia Gorin wrote three years later:

It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.

And just like that, the circle is squared: Global Warming: it’s the moral equivalent of terrorism — ask the terrorists themselves!

Update: Such desperate pandering to western leftists leads Allahpundit (trackbacks be upon him) to believe that al Qaeda has jumped the shark. I’d like to think that it also bespeaks similarly of the global warming brigade as well.

* In between getting down and/or getting funky, of course.