GOP Senate Candidate Compares Zelensky to Osama bin LadenFour days after joining the New Hampshire Republican primary, U.S. Senate hopeful and bitcoin millionaire Bruce Fenton compared the widespread adoration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the reaction to Osama bin Laden, warning that bin Laden was also once seen as a “hero.”
Fenton spun up the cautionary tale last week in his first televised interview as a candidate, telling WMUR’s Adam Sexton that “there’s so many parallels right now between Ukraine and the Taliban.”
“Remember, as Zelensky is a hero now, Osama bin Laden was once considered a hero,” Fenton said.
It’s true that bin Laden—a mass-murdering terrorist and sworn enemy of the United States who was killed in a 2011 U.S. Navy SEAL team raid—was hailed by devoted followers. But that was not the pernicious idolatry to which Fenton was referring.
Fenton, who served for a time in the Navy as a hospital corpsman and claims to have completed “much of” SEAL training, was instead referring to the United States. Specifically, the 1980s, when bin Laden battled the Soviet Union alongside the Afghan mujahideen, which American operatives secretly armed as a proxy force.
“There were articles talking about how he was leading his army on a road to peace. There is a hero in a James Bond movie based on bin Laden,” Fenton explained, inaccurately.
The article he was apparently referencing—“Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace”—addressed bin Laden’s life after he decamped Afghanistan for Africa, in 1993. It also ran in The Independent, which is based in the United Kingdom, not the United States.
Further, the phrase “road to peace” only appears in the headline, as an ironic dig at bin Laden’s transparent attempt to pave over his militaristic reputation with a civic engineering project in Sudan. The report itself is deeply skeptical of the warlord, noting that “Outside Sudan, Mr. bin Laden is not regarded with quite such high esteem.” It even quotes bin Laden directly denying that the United States ever supported him: “Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help.”...................
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-sen-candidate-compares-zelensky-085135576.html
