Omar Osama bin Laden bears a striking resemblance to his notorious father — except for the dreadlocks that dangle halfway down his back. Then there's the black leather biker jacket.The 26-year-old does not renounce his father, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, but in an interview with The Associated Press, he said there is better way to defend Islam than militancy: Omar wants to be an "ambassador for peace" between Muslims and the West.
Omar — one of bin Laden's 19 children — raised a tabloid storm last year when he married a 52-year-old British woman, Jane Felix-Browne, who took the name Zaina Alsabah. Now the couple say they want to be advocates, planning a 3,000-mile horse race across North Africa to draw attention to the cause of peace.
Yeah, that should do it.
“Gee, Zaina, what could we do with all our millions of dollars to help bring peace to the world?”
”Well…..”
”I’ve got it! A horse race across Africa!”
” It’s so crazy, Omie, it just might work.”
Maybe a competition through Kenya or the refugee camps in Sudan is just what’s needed right now.
"It's about changing the ideas of the Western mind. A lot of people think Arabs — especially the bin Ladens, especially the sons of Osama — are all terrorists. This is not the truth," Omar told the AP last week at a cafe in a Cairo shopping mall.
Some of them are fun-loving rastamen.
"Omar thinks he can be a negotiator," said Alsabah, who is trying to bring her husband to Britain. "He's one of the only people who can do this in the world."
Ah, the eyes of love.
Teams from around the world will be encouraged to join in what the couple envisions as an equine version of the Paris-Dakar car rally. That rally was canceled this year due to fears over terrorist threats made by al-Qaida-affiliated groups in North Africa.Omar, however, said he isn't worried.
"I heard the rally was stopped because of al-Qaida," he said. "I don't think they are going to stop me."
[...]
"My father thinks he will be good for defending the Arab people and stop anyone from hurting the Arab or Muslim people any place in the world," [Omar] said, noting that the West didn't have a problem with his father when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
[...]
"My father is asking for a truce but I don't think there is any government (that) respects him. At the same time they do not respect him, why everywhere in the world, they want to fight him? There is a contradiction," he said.
If that’s a sample of your negotiating skills, I suggest you don’t quit your day job, Omar.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
You Will Anyway,
ReplyDeleteGood call. One of the more important "negotiating skills" is having, or getting, knowledge of who you're negotiating with.
Omar's rhetorical questions about his father and Western nations, where he wonders why, if they do not respect his father, they fight his father, suggests that his knowledge of European culture (and European-based American culture) is at least seven centuries out of date.
Knights, in feudal Europe, might have refused to fight someone they didn't respect, but times have changed.
But, although I don't put much stock in Omar's skills as a negotiator, I think that his horse race promises to be a spectacular media event.
If he pulls it together, that trans-African race could be a sort of reality-show version of "Hidalgo."
hidalgo. i thought of that very thing when i read this story. perhaps, being the obvious hip young man that omar is, he has seen the movie and was inspired by it.
ReplyDeletewhenever i start thinking (oh so often) that, of all the countries in the world, we have the most shamefully immature psyches in leadership and influential positions, i find that it's good to have a look around at what else is out there.
on the other hand, it's depressing in terms of any hope of human evolution.
mark twain wrote, "sometimes i wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it." i think if he were still alive, he'd have stopped wondering.
thanks for reading and thanks much for your comments.
blessings,
m