THE
ROVING EYE American rebel vs American
al-Qaeda By Pepe Escobar
"Let me be the voice, and your strength, and
your choice Let me simplify the rhyme, just to
amplify the noise Try to amplify the times, and
multiply it by six- Teen million people are equal of
this high pitch Maybe we can reach Al-Qaeda through
my speech ... Let the President answer on high
anarchy Strap him with an AK-47, let him go Fight
his own war, let him impress daddy that way No more
blood for oil, we got our battles to fight on our own
soil." Eminem, "Mosh"
"Allah
willing, the streets of America will run red with blood,
matching drop for drop the blood of America's
victims." - Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the
American), on the new purported al-Qaeda video
Unleashed only one week before the US
presidential election and already the No 1 video on MTV,
Eminem's "Mosh" is a stunning piece of political
hip-hop. When a millionaire white-trash rapper and his
posse hit the polls calling for regime change in the
White House, America can't help but listen.
The video
was produced, directed and edited by Ian Inaba of the
Guerrilla News Network (see the video at www.gnn.tv/content/viewer.html
). Inaba and a crack team
in animation, illustration, 3-D and motion graphics had
just five weeks to dress up the song. The lyrical Jesse
James power is Eminem's, but the video concept is
totally Inaba's.
The video - more than 90%
animation - starts with a cartoon Eminem in a suit
reading My Pet Goat upside down to a classroom
full of children. Only a few frames later we are
immersed in his thinking process post-September 11,
2001, and before the war on Iraq. We literally see
Eminem thinking and conceptualizing his rage as he
shadowboxes in front of a wall plastered with crucial
newspaper headlines - such as "Bush knew", "Bush
declares war", "Congress OKs US$87 billion", "Bush tax
cuts help rich" and "Blechtell" (sic). The wall, as a
symbol, is a powerful hip-hop quote of Pablo Picasso's
Guernica.
To the sound of Mosh's
hypnotically funereal beat, anti-war sentiment fuses
with classic class struggle. Eminem's persona merges
into the character Private Kelly, who is also thinking
hard, trying to conceptualize his rage. After watching
Eminem rapping live to the troops in Baghdad, Private
Kelly goes back home to his family and is greeted by a
"re-enlist" letter. He becomes a deserter, hoods up,
joins the mosh mob of the angry and disfranchised and
follows the Leader (Eminem himself) toward a new,
crucial mission. In this bleak atmosphere about to
be transformed, Osama bin Laden is nothing but a
cardboard cutout issuing fatwas from a sound
stage. When the fake cave wall falls, the happy
chattering duo of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld take
center stage.
Get out the vote "Mosh"
may have tremendous cultural and political impact on the
youth vote before the US presidential election and
beyond. There are more than 55 million people in the
United States between the ages of 18 and 35 - they make
up 36% of the total of eligible voters.
On the
surface, Eminem's political move is inscribed in a
larger battle between a Hobbesian world view - the
predominantly urban black, disfranchised,
fight-for-your-rights crowd - and the Rousseau
contingent - the more hipped-out, peace-and-love,
environmentally conscious dance/trance/chill-out crowd.
But Eminem transcends it by channeling the feelings of
disorientation of trailer-park America, suburban-mall
America and, especially, urban black America - which is
anti-Bush with a vengeance, as this correspondent
recently attested in Memphis, Chicago, Detroit and Los
Angeles (see Free at last?
May
28). The
urban black vote might always have been Democrat: but
the key point of Eminem's video is to force the
desperate masses, all kinds of desperate masses, not to
urban guerrillahood, but to the polls, "to disarm this
weapon of mass destruction that we call our president".
For an 18-year-old voting for the first time, "Mosh"
provokes the same impact that the barricades of May 1968
in Paris did on the "children of Mao and Coca-Cola", as
film genius Jean-Luc Godard put it. The esthetic of the
video may be cartoon teenage wasteland - a code easily
identified by Eminem's core audience - but hardly could
there be a better metaphor for the current US political
nightmare than "moshing". The thing is, Eminem and
director Inaba use "moshing" to organize a strategic,
political response to alienation and dystopia. Voting,
in this case, is only the first, necessary step toward a
society of real free speech and informed, participatory
democracy.
Blood on the tracks Rabid
right-wingers and apocalyptic evangelicals are likely to
compare Eminem to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But there are
more ominous things on the horizon when we're not
talking about MTV but - allegedly - real life.
Compare Eminem's get-out-the-vote message with
the man with his face covered by a keffiah and
sunglasses saying, in English, "The streets will run
with blood." The man, Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the
American), is the alleged new face of al-Qaeda, revealed
on a tape delivered to the ABC News office in Islamabad
last Sunday by a courier who got paid US$500. The
courier said he collected the tape in Peshawar the day
before, and assured that the video was filmed in the
Pakistani tribal areas.
The 75-minute digital
tape comes with the As-Sahab logo - al-Qaeda's
video-production company. The US Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
are assuming the man in the tape is white,
college-educated, and maybe not born in the US but
raised there. He speaks with a slight accent. He could
be one of hundreds of jihadis holding US or European
Union passports operating along the Afghan-Pakistani
border.
Some US intelligence sources believe he
could be Adam Yahiye Gadahn, born Adam Pearlman in
Orange County, California, whom the FBI has pinned as an
al-Qaeda translator. His nom de guerre is Abu
Suhayb al-Amriki. The al-Amriki in the tape quotes the
Holy Koran in Arabic, also speaking with an accent. The
rhetoric is classic al-Qaeda.
After what is
supposed to have been extensive examination by both the
CIA and the FBI, ABC News finally decided to broadcast
parts of the tape on Thursday. Both the Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and al-Jazeera say the
tape is the genuine article in terms of jihadi media,
with good production values such as Arabic subtitles and
a scrolling message across the bottom of the screen a
la CNN and Fox.
ABC News officially was not
sure if this was a very well-crafted hoax or a big
story. By airing the tape, it has shown it believes it
is a big story. But the most troubling thing was that
someone in the US Department of Homeland Security was
heavily leaking to gossip website Drudge Report to
pressure ABC to run the tape. Until very recently, any
al-Qaeda videos broadcast by al-Jazeera were considered
a threat to US national security - because they could
contain "secret codes" to al-Qaeda operatives, according
to the Bush administration narrative.
This is
the first time that an alleged al-Qaeda video features
an English-speaking actor, and the first time neither
Osama bin Laden nor Ayman al-Zawahiri shows up. As much
as As-Sahab engages in psy-ops, the CIA also does. If
authentic, the tape confirms - as this correspondent has
been arguing - that al-Qaeda votes Bush: al-Amriki says
that "what took place on September 11 was but the
opening salvo in the global war on America". And the
next attacks, he adds, "could come at any moment".
Whoever concocted this psy-ops - al-Qaeda or the CIA -
wanted to provoke the same effect: fear. This tape could
well have been scripted by Darth Vader Dick Cheney.
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