Bin Laden on race relations

I'm back from Israel after a totally exhausting but fascinating week, more on that later. A quick post for today: I just read Michael Scheuer's analysis of the bin Laden video that was released last week. Scheuer notes how bin Laden, like the other al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, attacked the US for being a racists country:

These two men [...] have focused on the imperfect state of black-white race relations in the United States and championed the Islamic ideas of Malcolm X, and bin Laden—possibly for the first time—hit on this theme in his September 7 statement. "It is severer than what the slaves used to suffer at your hands centuries ago," bin Laden said in regard to conditions for white and especially black U.S. soldiers in Iraq, "and it is as if some of them have gone from one slavery to another more severe and harmful, even if it be in the fancy dress of the Defense Department's financial enticements".

This reminded me of the take on American race relations of another old ideological enemy of the US. The picture below is an undated Soviet propaganda poster that I saw at the National Cold War Exhibition at RAF Cosford in the UK earlier this year.