Mistranslating Osama?

Chrenkoff links to the indispensible MEMRI, which has a new translation of a crucial paragraph in Osama's Friday lecture to America. In brief, they say Osama threatened each U.S. state separately rather than America as a whole. Here's their explanation:

"The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera [1] on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to 'each U.S. state,' designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words 'ay wilaya' (which means 'each U.S. state') [2] to mean a 'country' or 'nation' other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: 'Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.'

"The Islamist website Al-Qal'a explained what this sentence meant: 'This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, "Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice," it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn't treat all American people as if they're the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections.'" [3]

As Hindrocket at Power Line says, if this is correct it's a much more direct attempt to influence the election than was originally thought. I'd go a couple of steps further to say that it evinces a far more sophisticated understanding of American politics than I would have imagined from Osama and his outfit. For that reason, although I'm certainly in no position to evaluate any translation from Arabic, I wonder if they're not splitting hairs in rendering his words this way. Remember that America was usually referred to as "these United States" until after the Civil War, when the nomenclature changed to "the United States." And one still hears the first usage occasionally, and not just by CSA diehards. Plus, we're regularly referred to as "the States" by Europeans, at least. Since we use the same word, "state," for both the 50 individual territorial governments and when speaking of sovereign nations, I wouldn't be surprised if some confusion crept in.

But let me take it a step further. When Machiavelli uses the term "lo stato," he means something that one can take possession of, both as territory and as idea. It wasn't until much later that "state" took on the more abstract meanings we still ascribe to it, as when we speak of the "growth of the state," or "statism," or "statist."

This isn't to say that Osama wasn't appealing to each individual state in an effort to throw the Electoral College to Kerry. And I don't know the nuances of Arabic words meaning, approximately, the "state," nor the extent of Western influence on those terms. It is to say that "state" is an odd word with a long history, and we should be careful lest we translate OBL in a way that's too clever by half.