Monday 9 May 2011

A strange, lonely and troubling death...

The news of Osama bin Laden’s death was deeply shocking. It was not just that another middles-aged Islamic man had died pointlessly.

Through the recent travails and sad ends of Saddam Hussein, Ali Hassan al-Majid and many others, citizens know to expect the unexpected of their Islamic cousins - particularly if those idols live a life that is shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice.

There are dozens of household names out there with secret and not-so-secret hide-outs, or damaging habits both past and present.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Anwar al-Awlaki, Khalid al-Asiri,  Abu Hamza al-Masri, Abu Izzadeen (or should I say Trevor Brooks); we all know who they are. And we are not being ghoulish to anticipate, or to be mentally braced for, their bad end: a long night, a mysterious stranger, an odd set of circumstances that herald a sudden death.

In the morning, a body has already turned cold before the first concerned hand reaches out to touch an icy Muslim shoulder. It is not exactly a new storyline, is it?

In fact, it is rather depressingly familiar. But somehow we never expected it of him. Never him. Not Osama bin Laden.

In the cheerful environs of Al-Qaeda, bin Laden was always charming, deadly, ruthless and terrifying.

A founder member of Afghanistan’s first non card-carrying Islamic fundamentalist organisation, he was the group's lead figurehead, even though he could barely carry a Kalashnikov in a Camel skin tote bag.

He became the Posh Spice of Al-Qaeda, a popular but largely decorous addition.

Laden came out as Islamic in 1992 after discovering bombing, initially targeting the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden where he believed that bombing civilians was justified as the innocent bystanders would find their proper reward in death.

Although he was effectively smoked out of the closet, he has been hailed as a champion of Islamic rights, albeit a terrorist one.

At the time, Laden worried that the revelations might end his ultra-mainstream career as a US employed CIA operative, but he received an overwhelmingly positive response from fans. In fact, it only made them love him more.

In 2001, Laden entered into a thinly veiled excuse for a holy resource war by goading the invasion of Iraq by hapless US president George W Bush, who had been introduced to him by mutual friends Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld.

Last week, the couple were enjoying a holiday apart from each other in separate palatial high security private homes before their world was capsized.

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All the official reports point to a completely legal death, with no suspicious circumstances. The al-Qaeda organisation are - perhaps understandably - keen to register their boy's demise on the national consciousness as nothing less than a martyrdom.

Even before the post-mortem and grainy video stills were released by the US authorities, the world’s citizens reiterated that they believed his sudden death was due to assassination.

But, hang on a minute. Something is terribly wrong with the way this incident has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend, like a broken teacup in the rented cottage.

Consider the way it has been largely reported, as if bin Laden had been brutally shot to death by a death squad of twenty US flag waving, baseball loving, apple pie eating, specially trained crack US marines.

The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Politically waning insane 54-year-old Jihadist leaders do not automatically surpass the boundaries of the basic human right to a fair trial in a court of law.

1 comment:

  1. As this is my first blog post, I think it might be a good idea to explain:

    Just in case any of you have read this and think I've lost my mind (or the ability to write coherent English), the above is a direct copy of the hideously repellent article Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote about the "circumstances" around Stephen Gately's death back in November 2009, all I've done is replaced certain key words to make it read about big bin Laden instead.

    It's supposed to be a comment of sorts on the hyperbole and reasonably worrying articles published about Osama's demise over the last week or so (or something like that).

    Original article here for you those of you who don't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of hate-filled Daily Mail articles:
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1220756/A-strange-lonely-troubling-death--.html

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