Osama's Undoing

Tony Karon declares al-Qaeda a failure:

The flaw in bin Laden's strategy of trying to capture the imagination of the Muslim masses through spectacular acts of terror was obvious even in the immediate wake of 9/11. In much of the Arab and Muslim world, there was a pervasive refusal to believe that Muslims had been responsible for the attacks, even after bin Laden claimed responsibility. The denial inherent in the tendency common from Egypt to Indonesia to blame the Mossad or the CIA for 9/11 reveal a damning negation of al-Qaeda's tactics so repulsive was the mass murder of innocents to ordinary Muslims that most refused to celebrate the attacks, as bin Laden had hoped they might, but instead sought to blame them on those deemed enemies of Islam.

The greatest irony was that some in the Muslim world believed "the Jews" did it! But what a karmic thought: that anti-Semitism undermined Osama bin Laden.