The following are excerpts from an Al-Qaeda tape featuring a Western Al-Qaeda terrorist, which aired on Al-Arabiya TV on August 9, 2005. Al-Arabiya claims he is Irish.

Terrorist: Oh people of the West, don't be fooled by the lies of Blair and Bush that you are free nations, for the only freedom that you have is the freedom to be slaves of your whims and desires. Your children are free to be deprived of their childhood and their innocence. Your women are free to be used as tools of business and entertainment, and all of you as a whole are the slaves of con men and women who rule you. They are your real enemies. If you only knew – they are the ones who drag your countries to the pit of America's group of scavengers, who seek to ravage the entire globe for the interests of a handful of gangsters and corporate companies. Democracy, human rights, and freedom are all but hollow illusions, with which they tranquilize inhabitants of the human farms which they control. The Muslim world is not your backyard. The Muslim world is not Germany, Japan, or South America. The honorable sons and daughters of Islam will not sit down, watching you spread your evil and immorality and infidelity to our land. The honorable sons of Islam will not just let you kill our families in Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the Balkans, Indonesia, the Caucuses, and elsewhere. It is time for us to be equals – as you kill us, you will be killed, as you bomb us, you will be bombed.  Source: Memri.

 

The following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian professor Abd Al-Sabour Shahin, which aired on Saudi Channel 1 on August 8, 2005.

Shahin: I believe a dirty Zionist hand carried out this act. Zionism has taken the opportunity to escalate the war in Palestine, killing hundreds of thousands so far, while we watch from the sidelines in astonishment and ask: What's going on ?

Our enemies weave many lies about us, which we are not necessarily aware of. For example: One day, we awoke to the crime of 9/11, which hit the tallest buildings in New York, the Empire State Building (sic). There is no doubt that not a single Arab or Muslim had anything to do with these events. The incident was fabricated as a pretext to attack Islam and Muslims. The plan was to take over the world's energy sources, and to achieve this control by force and not by agreement or negotiations, by interests, free trade, or anything like that. This is what they wanted. So this incident was fabricated - and Allah knows that the Arabs and Muslims are innocent of it - in order to serve as a pretext to attack Islam and the Muslims. All of a sudden, after we were used to consider America to be a rational and balanced country... All of a sudden, it violates international conventions, cancels treaties, ignores the U.N., acts on its own accord, attacks nations, kills innocent people, and claims it has the right to do so - and all this is based on lies. These were lies from beginning to end, and we were not used to lying - not in policy, not in our discourse, and not in the media. Imagine what crisis the Arab and Islam nation finds itself in, in the midst of these peculiar events, which we cannot explain or believe. All of a sudden, we were framed for an international crime, on the basis of lies. Source: Memri.