It's All About Oil

For Al Qaeda, that is:

Osama bin Laden called on his fighters to focus their attacks on oil sites in the Gulf and Iraq while urging Saudi leaders to give up power or face a popular uprising, in a new purported audiotape message Thursday.

"Take jihad (holy war) to stop (the Americans) getting hold of (the oil). Concentrate your operations on the oil, in particular in Iraq and the Gulf," said the voice on the tape attributed to the Al-Qaeda leader.

It's a new tactic, but the same Al Qaeda. Promising to be "sensitive," less "capitalistic" or more secular won't help. That's not why they hate us. Islam declared war on the West because we're not Muslim, as Mark Steyn observed:

[W]hen people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, 'We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.' The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew - like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they're happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali.

So two options remain: win the war or bow to Mecca, as this Saudi citizen discovered.

I'm not the bowing type; are you?

More:

They've attacked oil pipelines already. Given the environmental damage from spilled oil, liberals doubtlessly will rally to America's cause.

(via LGF)