Osama Bin Laden one of the founders of Al-Qaeda ("The Base") is dead. Killed on the 1st May by US marines in a house just next to one of Pakistan's major military colleges, where he had lived for five years. He joined the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s when he became disgusted with the greed of the Saudi elite, of which he was a part. The Al-Qaeda doctrine is that the Muslim world has lost it's way morally and politically. Only their form of radical Sunni theology can free it from the overwhelming external and internal colonization that dominates it today. Their only success seems to have been the Taliban rule of Afghanistan of the 1990s , which became a byword for the cruelty of fundamentalist religion.
If countries in the Middle East achieve democracy then this will be a real death blow to Al-Qaeda. Will Egypt and Tunisia achieve real democracy? Will the war in Libya end, with the pro democracy rebels still in charge? Will the Assad regime fall in Syria, or will it continue to be propped up by Iran, China, Russia, Turkey ....? Will the Saudi and Gulf oil states move to constitutional monarchy, and take seriously their Islamic duty to invest in the human resources of the Arab world? When all this has happened is the time to celebrate, and say that all that Osama Bin Laden stood for was wrong. I pray for that day. God bless you.
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