Bin Laden - done hidin'
May 2, 2011
THE NEWS is just in that Osama Bin Laden has been killed after a U.S.-raid on a secure compound in Abbottabad, a garrison town just 70 miles or so from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
The crowds gather around the White House and crow, as if a great enemy has been vanquished, and grieving family members recall the events of nearly a decade ago and use words like “justice” and “closure” and “retribution”.
But Bin Laden was already only a symbol – an elusive figurehead providing a unified brand identity for a protean terrorist organisation – and symbols don’t die easily. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague says there could be a brief spasm of activity from al-Qaeda cells across the globe, desperate to prove that they still matter.
In Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens, Osama is portrayed as a priggish and puritanical black sheep in a family of corrupt wastrels and spendthrifts, sharing little with them apart from an overweening sense of self-importance and aristocratic entitlement.
Osama told an al-Jazeera interviewer shortly after 9-11 that the 2001 World Trade Center attacks were an act of retribution for all the Muslim innocents killed by the United States over the years. Presumably, Bin Laden would cite U.S. aid to Israel, or its strikes against Libya or Iraq, or its support for venal, feudal monsters in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Kazakhstan, or its role in the overthrow of Mossadegh, or its failure to protect Bosnia until late in the Yugoslavian wars, or its failure to protect Chechnya in any way at all.
In the end, this inconsistent mishmash of alleged sins – direct and indirect, of omission and commission – point to another underlying motive, which again seems to arise from Bin Laden’s overwhelming sense of entitlement. It became clear what the gist of the argument was when Australia was declared a mortal enemy of Islam for supporting the independence of East Timor against the “Islamic” republic of Indonesia. It isn’t simply a matter of Islam above all, especially when you consider the amount of Muslims killed as a result of al-Qaeda actions. It all comes down to restoring the old glories of Islam, when the Caliph could lay claim to half of Europe and controlled most of the global economy.
Some have argued that bin Laden’s discourse frequently resembled that of any secular revolutionary movement, and that his positions are a reflection of the economic and geopolitical dominance of the (Christian) West. The al-Jazeera interview revealed Osama’s fascination with the movements of the New York stock exchange and its mounting losses after 9-11, and in others he expressed his resentment at the way the economies of the Islamic world had fallen behind the West and were being strangled by the tentacles of global finance.
But let’s not forget the fetid feudal ideologies behind al-Qaeda and its gruesome ilk – its fear of women, free-thinkers and sexual deviants, its intolerance of any sort of manifestation of joy, lest it undermine the strictures of faith and obedience, or give the people some idea of what they are missing out on by associating with medieval fascists like Bin Laden or Mullah Omar.
