Bin Laden Goes Green?

File this under weird: Osama bin Laden's latest ideological rant against the United States targets our failure to address climate change.

Is Bin Laden making an effort to recruit environmentalists to al Qaeda after reading that the U.K. treats climate activists as terrorists?

Or is this some kind of leftie hoax? (The audiotape, which was aired on Al Jazeera, hasn't yet been authenticated.) Not only did Bin Laden criticize the U.S. for failing to sign the Kyoto Protocal, but he also offered a word of praise for Jewish activist Noam Chomsky. (Muslim fundamentalists are not known to love Jews, even those that criticize Israel.)

In more typical fashion, Bin Laden called for a boycott of the dollar and attacked globalization and economic speculation.

In a sense, the focus on climate change is in keeping with Al Qaeda's view of the United States as a wasteful consumerist culture that exports its way of life.

Right-wingers who oppose action on the climate have not missed an opportunity to join the U.K. in connecting environmentalists and terrorists. The website RedState called Bin Laden's views "nearly indistinguishable from those of radical environmentalists, European anarchists, or many Congressional Democrats."

Of course, Al Qaeda is hardly green itself. Blowing up airplanes does not maximize fuel economy, not to mention the environmental health impacts that continue to fester among Manhattan residents and emergency responders.

War in general is a huge consumer of fossil fuel — the same fossil fuel that is often among the reasons that we fight.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons