In November 2002, a prominent Al-Qaeda website posted a 4,000-word diatribe described as a letter from Osama bin Laden to the American people. In the course of the screed, which purports to explain the grievances of the Muslim world, bin Laden takes special care to lay out the reasons for America's moral inferiority. High among them, he writes, is the fact that:

 

          You are a nation that permits usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions.
          Yet you build your economy and investments on usury. As a result of this, in all its
          different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through
          which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of
          your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense.

Here was a compact summation of a centuries-old case for anti-Semitism, complete with the identification of capitalism with usury, the identification of usury with the Jews, and the assertion of a resulting Jewish conspiracy to dominate non-Jewish majorities through the exercise of economic, social, and political power. It showed that Islamism is not so disconnected from prior political and cultural extremisms. But it also evidenced the still thorny and complex relationship between capitalism and the Jews.

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