CAIRO — Osama bin Laden lashed out Thursday at Palestinian peace negotiations with Israel and called for a holy war to liberate the Palestinian lands.
A day after a bin Laden audio on a militant website threatened Europeans, al-Jazeera TV broadcast audio excerpts attributed to the al-Qaeda leader that urge Palestinians to ignore political parties “mired in trickery of the blasphemous democracy” and to rely on armed might.
“Palestine cannot be retaken by negotiations and dialogue, but with fire and iron,” he said.
It was the first time bin Laden had spoken of the Palestinian question at length since the deteriorating situation in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military has been fighting with militants who fire rockets into southern Israel.
Bin Laden added that Palestinians who are unable to fight in the “land of Al-Quds” — a Muslim reference to Jerusalem — should join the al-Qaeda fight in Iraq.
“The nearest field of jihad today to support our people in Palestine is the Iraqi field,” he said.
He also called on the people of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to “help in support of their mujahedeen brothers in Iraq, which is the greatest opportunity and the biggest task.”
Al-Jazeera did not say how it obtained the recording, which was broadcast with an old photograph of bin Laden in a white head scarf and Arab dress.
There was no indication how recently the recording was made, or whether it was an unreleased part of the audio posted late Wednesday on an extremist website that has carried al-Qaeda statements in the past. The two messages were bin Laden’s first this year.
In the first recording, bin Laden accused Pope Benedict XVI of helping in a “new Crusade” against Muslims and warned of a “severe” reaction for Europeans’ publication of cartoons seen by Muslims as insulting Islam’s prophet.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the contents of bin Laden’s message “are filled with hate and encouraging people to murder innocents in the name of a perverted and depraved cause.”
A Vatican spokesman said Thursday that bin Laden’s accusation about the pope was baseless.
