Top News Article | Reuters.co.uk: "DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said the West's shunning of the Hamas-led Palestinian government showed it was waging a 'Crusader-Zionist war' on Muslims, according to an audiotape attributed to him and aired on Sunday.
People in the West share responsibility for their countries' 'war against Islam', said the speaker, who sounded like bin Laden, on the tape broadcast on Al Jazeera television.
The Saudi-born militant said the Darfur crisis in western Sudan and Western efforts to isolate the Palestinian government since Hamas won January elections were part of this campaign.
'Their rejection of Hamas affirms that it is a Crusader-Zionist war against Muslims,' bin Laden said.
In the brief excerpts of the tape that Al Jazeera aired, he did not repeat his assertion in an audiotape issued in January that al Qaeda was preparing attacks in the United States but was open to a conditional truce with Americans.
But his remarks about the complicity of Westerners in the policies of their governments appeared to be an argument that they were fair game for revenge attacks by militants.
'The war is a responsibility shared between the people and the governments. The war goes on and the people are renewing their allegiance to its rulers and masters,' bin Laden said.
'They send their sons to armies to fight us and they continue their financial and moral support while our countries are burnt and our houses are bombed and our people are killed.'
The Qaeda leader, on the run since the U.S. campaign to oust Afghanistan's Taliban government in 2001 after the September 11 attacks, said Western leaders had ignored his truce offers.
'They do not want a truce unless it is from our side only ."
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