Osama Bin Laden is a master propagandist with a powerful hold on millions of Muslims around the world. The scholars behind the new book, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, say an analysis of his speeches and sermons reveals a man of great “literary gifts.”

From the Boston Globe:

Much of what’s in Messages to the World is unsurprising: the 9/11 hijackers extolled as “heroes, true men”; Israel’s founding called “a crime which must be erased”; the United States as “the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”

But there are also plenty of images — vivid, ironic or just odd — that rise above run-of-the-mill propaganda: jihadis “with disheveled hair and dusty feet, who had been chased all over the world”; George W. Bush “embroiled in the quagmires of Iraq” like “the grumpy goat who dug out of the ground the very knife with which he would be killed.”

For (scholar Bruce) Lawrence, turns of phrase such as these evince the “powerful lyricism” and considerable “literary gifts” that help explain bin Laden’s continued popularity in much of the Islamic world, even as most Muslims reject his methods. “Bin Laden,” Lawrence writes in the introduction, “has earned many labels by now — fanatic, nihilist, fundamentalist, terrorist — but what actually distinguishes him, among a host of those described in these ways, is that he is first and foremost a polemicist.”

The book’s assemblers believe that understanding how Bin Laden speaks and writes is key to understanding how to combat him.

Technorati tags: Polemics, PR, Propaganda, Osama Bin Laden