That comment rather illustrates the mistake I mean. Take that last point about neo-Nazis, it is exactly like what Orwell said, that there are people who do not understand that others can be motivated by racial frenzy. Some of Hitler's early backers were simple crooks who thought they were using him for relatively prosaic political ends, but Hitler had his own ends that he pushed through with some force.

Similarly you say that when bin Laden condemns American decadence or depravity from an Islamic perspective, that's just propaganda to advance a political cause. What if it is the other way around? What if bin Laden instead invokes political grievances to advance a religious agenda? You assume that it cant possibly be that, but: Look at that document again - bin Laden goes into the usual rap against America and the West, but what he asks for is submission to Islam, to Shariah. His aim is, in his own words, explicitly theocratic.

Take the obvious parallel of Hitler. Yes, you can point to the role of inflation, mass unemployment etc. as allowing his rise. But you cannot draw a line from those to the genocide of the Jews. Even if you ditch morality, a global conflict and the mass extermination of one of your most productive minorities is lousy business sense. The whole thing is completely inexplicable unless you turn it around. The aim was, always, the genocide of the Jews and global conflict, and the problems of Germany allowed Hitler a chance to implement that program. So it is with bin Laden.

You make my point when you say that " bin Laden objected to the presence of foreign troops in Saudi Arabia." But why did he object? Those weren't an occupying army, they were there at the explicit request of the Saudi monarchy to prevent Saudi Arabia from being invaded. There was nothing like, e.g., the IDF in Gaza for him to point to.

The reason is simple: there's an Islamic hadith that makes it clear that while People of the Book may be kept in subjection elsewhere, it is not permitted to allow any infidels into Arabia, the holy Land of the Two Mosques. It's an explicitly religious motive.

This is what I mean that sometimes you just can't see the box, cannot understand that other people see the world in a radically different way, that their hopes and desires are not like yours. You call this description of bin Laden's motives "superficial". Why? Because it isn't one that is morally intelligible to you. But why should that mean that those motives are wrong? Isn't it the exact opposite of superficial to think that people are capable of radically differing, and that not everyone is alike?