Zawahiri rants against democracy in Palestine

AP/NY Times:

Osama bin Laden's second-in-command criticized both sides of the Palestinian power struggle in a videotape aired Wednesday, calling the Palestinian president ''America's man'' but also lashing out at the Islamic group Hamas.

Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahri scoffed at the plan to hold early elections in the Palestinian territories, saying voting would lead only to defeat and the right policy was armed struggle.

''Any way other than holy war, will lead us only to loss and defeat,'' al-Zawahri said in clips broadcast by Al-Jazeera, the Qatari-based satellite channel.

He did not say whom the Palestinians should fight, but previously he has always recommended ''holy war'' against Israel and the West.

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Perhaps he favors armed struggle against each other. Actually this rant is about the cultural war Islam is having with the west. In previous rants he has gone off on democracy as some foreign cultural exercise invented in Greece of all places. He is still fighting the same battles of over 2500 years ago, adding his religious bigotry as a veneer on to the cultural clash. The US is trying to lift the Muslim world out of the 12 century and these guys are resisting with everything they have. They do have a truly awful culture they are fighting to preserve.