How Will Posterity Treat Osama Bin Laden?

For almost a decade he was the top of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List and the media’s pet bogeyman in the West. 

His death from ”Ballistic Trauma” (being shot in plain English) became a global media event instantly. Planes flying into the twin towers in Manhattan - this iconic image has spread globally and is probably forever associated with Osama Bin Laden. 

What kind of role would posterity give him?

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How Osama Bin Laden Became the Big Baddie

Daddy bin Laden was a collossal achiever by any measure. Osama bin Laden’s father, was in illiterate poor lad from a poor area called hadramaut or ”death is among us” in Yemen. This poor lad became the personification of the American dream. He reaches Jeddah, begins as a porter and starts his own construction business to eventually become the favourite royal architect and the richest non-royal in the country. Religious and very loyal to his regal patrons (In 1964 he saved the broke royal house by lending them money when Prince Feisal deposed King Saud), he gave a personal touch to recycling. He divorced almost all of his 22 wives, never keeping more than four at a time.

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Daddy bin Laden (on the right) with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia in mid 1990s

He divorced his tenth wife, Osama’s mother, soon after the kid was born. Then daddy (with 54 children) recommends his mother to an associate, who marries her and they have four children. So Osama grows up in a household with three half-brothers and one half-sister. Though attending university, he never got a degree or acquired a profession. Being born very wealthy in Saudi Arabia, one doesn’t even have to think of such banalities as earning one’s living by working.

Photo source: Osama in Oxford, UK on a visit with family in 1971. (second from right)

At 17 Osama or Usama marries his first cousin, a Syrian woman, the first of his six wives, two of whom he would later divorce. He would father 20-26 children with his wives. Here is a link to his family tree.

Photo source: 17 year old Osama Bin Laden with family in Falun, Sweden (second from right)

Osama is seen as handsome, has polite and refined manners, loads of money and is considered gifted. Here begins the central problem of all gifted persons – what do with this gift? He has no role model except daddy, against whom he has to rebel. He can’t direct the fire, the daemon in himself to a cause. He doesn’t have the Moses-like quality of transforming an entire civilization like Kemal Ataturk. He is not willing to personally suffer the hardship of long marches like Mao Tse Tung as he travels always with his retinue of wives and children. 

Osama’s charisma is compelling but he definitely wasn’t an intellectual speaking many languages after personally experiencing the injustices of foreign powers like the swashbuckling Che Guevara in his travels. He seems to lack the spiritual depth of T E Lawrence fighting for the Arab cause. Compared to Muhammad Ahmad (1844-1885), the Mahdi or the Bin Laden of the British Empire, Osma also did not personally lead successful battles. 

Photo Source: Muhammad Ahmad, The Mahdi

So the directionless 19-year-old lad arrives in Afghanistan to join the defensive jihad of the Palestinian Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. The Mujahideen, set up and funded by the USA welcomed him, his sincere and principled devotion and his money. After Soviet Union withdraws in ignominy from Afghanistan, Osama returns to Saudi Arabia a hero. Disappointment creeps in when it dawns upon him that the regime in his own country doesn’t want him. He turns against them. Expelled to Sudan, he becomes the ultimate outsider with no country, no tribe no social class or group to call his own and fight for. He finds his home in an idea of Jihad where innocents can also be slaughtered. 

Though the outsider’s angst and miseries are a prophet’s teething troubles, few become prophets. A person destined to be a prophet, rejects the bustle of society, ventures alone into the desert and descends into himself.  The loneliness may not bring him proximity of his chosen vision of divinity, but he hears in the solitude something more than the echo of the impulse that brought him there.

Osama's Main Target Becomes America

Osama chooses to appear as a prophet, without the schooling of the lonely dark night of the soul. 

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He takes over from Ayatolla Khomeini to rant against the moral corruption of America and their allies. His enemies want him to assume that role more than anyone else as it gives them a justification for wars and acts of retaliations. Ironically he becomes more of their creation than his own. Rather than growing to take in life as it is and could be, he becomes a pipe through which events unfold, often in spite of him. His existence and his death ultimately serve them more that his followers.

The war he joins is one of preaching and not of fighting because in preaching he finds his cause. Egoistically he aligns himself to the locus of the moving finger of history, where all great empires crumble under their own megalomania, mostly due to economic, social and moral corruption. This was the undoing of the Soviet Union, with the help of USA, and now it was to be America’s turn.

He would have liked to give America a chance to redeem itself by reconnecting its activities with the lofty idea that is America, the noble vision of the founding fathers. The rulers of America couldn’t care less, he felt, eerily like the unabomber Ted Kaczynski, PhD. This frustration echoes in Osama's statement. 

“We were fighting against the communists since 1979, and now the United States was pressuring us to cooperate with those very same communists. The United States has no principles. To achieve its own interest, it forgets every principle.” 

When a person resorts to violence or terrorism against a society, what else does the system do but return the favour! An individual can turn the other cheek, but can a state law enforcement system do so?

American propaganda leaflet in Afghanistan. Bin Laden second from left (note the raised finger).

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Towers, Airplanes and America as Important Symbols for Osama’s Life

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As a poor boy, Osama’s father had dreamt of building towers and that is how he became rich. He was the first private citizen in Saudi Arabia to own an airplane and was killed in an air crash in Saudi Arabia in 1967, due to the American pilot’s landing error. His eldest half-brother Salem (the next head of the family and who had a British wife) accidentally flew his plane into power lines in San Antonio, Texas and was killed. The iconic image of the planes crashing into the twin towers in New York in 9/11 sealed his fame as the world’s most known baddie.

What do the Jokes About Osama’s Death Reveal?

Most of the American jokes about Osama’s death continue the work of the seals, taking pot-shots at the favourite bogeyman to score domestic political political.

• "The Republicans are so happy about bin Laden they've granted President Obama full citizenship." —David Letterman
• "Osama Bin Laden's supporters want to rename the Arabian Sea where his body was dumped Martyr Sea. Really? Martyr Sea? Hiding in your bedroom for six years? How about Chicken of the Sea?" –Jay Leno
• Breaking News: Donald Trump is now on a quest to see his death certificate...
• Osama's last words: "Man, I just got my iphone 4, too! How did they find me?"

Here's a pre-Ballistic-trauma joke about Osama

• Osama Bin Laden seeks out a fortune-teller, since he knows there is a price on his head. The fortune-teller says, "You will die on a major US holiday." 
• Bin Laden says, "Which one?" 
• She replies, "Doesn't matter! Whatever day you die, it's gonna be a major US holiday."

The best Osama death joke is from DanaArikane who wrote: "They should have captured Bin Laden alive and made him continually go through airport security for the rest of his life." This would vibe with everyone who goes through airport security.

Deathers probably love this one.

• "What? Not only did we kill Bin Laden, we killed him in Abottabad! Abottabad sounds like name most New Yorkers would have invented for the fictional place they would have loved to kill Bin Laden." –Jon Stewart

Conspiracy theorists would love this one:

• Obama overheard during Bin Laden raid: "Are we shooting this in the same studio where we faked the moon landing?"
• There is a new Cocktail called Osama. 2 Shots and a splash of water!

This one is for people who hate President Obama:

• Obama - The first black guy that has ever had to convince the world he did do the killing.

In Pakistan and the sub-continent, the Pakistani army are the butt of local jokes.

• "No honking: the army is asleep" and another read as: "Public Service Message from the Army: Stay alert. Don't rely on us."
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• "Pakistan radar system for sale: $99.99, buy one, get one free (Can't detect US helicopters but can receive Star Plus.)"

Pakistani blogger Syed Ali Abbas Zaidi posted some of the best bin Laden jokes on his blog: 

• "It has been recently revealed that Osama bin Laden was a visiting faculty at Pakistan Military Academy, where he was teaching Global Terrorism 101"
• "Osama Bin Laden's Facebook status has not changed from RIP. It was Resting In Pakistan before".

Not Jokes but Prayers for Osama bin Laden divides Muslims

Though most Muslims did not like Osama or his negative message of hate and violence, some still continue to revere him.

In Kolkata, India, the Shahi Imam of Tipu Sultan mosque, Maulana Nurur Rehman Barkati, held special Friday prayer for the "peace of the soul" of bin Laden.

In Chennai, the imam of a major mosque on Anna Salai Road announced prayers for bin Laden, and many people responded by praying.

The Al-Qaeda has vowed to avenge the killing and so the senseless killing of mostly innocents goes on and on.

Osama as The Frankenstein of the Media Age

When 9/11 happens, Osama denies twice and then almost reluctantly claims responsibility. Later he begins bragging about planning them. He continues his preaching and his stature grows as the media credit him with all kinds of evil acts and machinations. He became the justification for two ongoing wars, though the UK government officially admits that the case against him would not be a prosecutable case in a court of law. 

Interestingly, Osama has played a significant role in US presidential elections. He dutifully turned up when with some kind of diatribe and venomous preaching or evil action whenever there was a need to swing public opinion. So, now he can be killed, sorry, subjected to ballistic trauma, but he can’t be debogyfied. So the pathetic aging man (probably only a citizen of Bosnia at that time) sitting in his luxury home next to Pakistan’s West Point military academy and watching videotapes of himself reading hate messages will continue being the worst of the baddies.

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Would historians a century from now be tempted to say that Osama was successful in bringing down not one but two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the USA as the costs of these wars are many trillions of dollars and not even the mighty US economy can bear it for too long? This is extremely unlikely!

The likelihood that he will soon be forgotten and end up as a footnote in history is also very  probable.

How to Call this Current Decade 2000-2009?

As this year 2009 begins with a miasma of gloom, financial turmoil and yet another inexhaustible cycle of violence, I can’t help reflecting on this past decade. But a question of terminology bothers me. 

Being old enough to admit remembering the sixties, growing up in the seventies and being a responsible adult in the eighties and nineties I am clueless as to how should I call this current decade. Here are some candidates I found in my search for the missing name.

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The Ohs (0's) – Short, nifty and slightly slangish. Could you visualize yourself saying in thirty years time “We met and married during the Ohs, when we were all shaken by terrorism and the financial crash”?

The Zeros – Pretty cool. But this has a reductionary effect. “Look at her, constantly moaning about terrorism and the lack of corporate social responsibility – so zeros!”

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The Oughts – That is how some people living between 1900-1909 used to refer to that decade in Britain. Hasn’t spread yet. Highly unlikely that Americans would use this term.

The Naughts – Has a nice twang to it. Also highly unlikely to spread. Imagine people born between 2000-2009 being called “the naughties”. Americans don’t use the word “naught” for zero. Besides, many Americans are too prissy for any public hint of forbidden pleasures.

The Oh-Ohs (00's) – This sounds a bit too artificial. With the global financial crisis and national debt clocks in many countries accelerating at the speed of light, this might signify people who owe and owe to everyone.

The Two Thousands (2000's) - Seems obvious though not very accurate. Will this also be used for the years 2000-2999?

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"The Turn of the Century/Millennium" – Though rather long, this could become popular. But then it would include years on both sides, from 1995-2000 and from 2000-2010, wouldn’t it?

"The International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World," – This is what the United Nations General Assembly would like to call this decade. This gives me a shudder, something akin to what they say in Facebookeese - OMG! Can you imagine anyone except bureaucrats using this?

D12K – The first decade of the second millennium. Very geekish. Can’t imagine anyone  actually using this.

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The Bush era – This is hardly likely. People all over the world wouldn’t let America’s most miserable president dominate their vocabulary after he’s gone in a few days time. Some time ago, the words “miserable failure” typed into Google search gave President Bush’s biography on the White House site. Google 'rectified' the page and here's the reasons why.

Terrorism Decade – Bläh! Most people are already tired of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Blair fearmongering. Other things happened during the decade also.

"I suppose we have the same problem today as with the 1900-1910 decade -- it's just awkward to say, 'The Zeroes,' or 'The Aughts,'" says David Kennedy, historian at Stanford. "

Matt Soergel wrests with this same issue in Florida Times Union, Jacksonville.com.

Already in 2002, the BBC wrote that no one had any clue about how to call this decade. 

The dilemma still remains. Can you solve this problem?

Why is the Mumbai Terrorist Event Different?

The heinous terrorist events in Mumbai on 26.11.2008 have shocked not only India, but people around the world. It has been called India’s 9/11, signifying that the period of innocence is over.

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Labelling the pre-Mumbai atrocities times as times of innocence displays a stupendous ignorance of facts and realities. 

• According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal 2765 people died due to terrorism in 2006 in India and 3236 in 2005 (which is more than the 2974 killed in 9/11). 
• All this happened in 14 of the 27 states of India. 
• Some of these terrorists openly claimed and were caught at having foreign backing and support, while others were home grown ones. 

Now, this does not also justify saying that “Oh, the people in Mumbai are used to terrorism!” Whether in India, Pakistan, USA, UK or Spain, no one is ever used to terrorism, it is always a traumatic event for people involved.

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Indian Authorities Unprepared for Terrorist Attack

What is significant about the Mumbai incident was that similar to 9/11, the Indian authorities were caught with their trousers down again. The audacity of only 10 people to take on such high profile targets and wreak so much havoc for such a long period, however, reveals something even more pernicious. Terrorism has now adopted a Wikipedia approach to massive destruction, where planners can rely on users (media, terrorism analysis industry and media users) filling in the gaps and contributing to their aims of spreading terror.

Photo Credit: Mary R. Vogt

The masterminds behind the Mumbai attacks have recognised the existence of a Terrorism-hungry media, a terrorism analysis industry, local politicians and power groups eager to capitalise on the event and most significantly that guarantee of instant fame that media accords to the perpetrators. 

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A few days ago the news of the British terror suspect Rashid Rauf being killed in a US drone attack in North Waziristan was spread in global media along with his picture.

Celebrity Terrorism?

By wilfully showing their faces on CCTV cameras, the terrorists betrayed their intentions that their images would be broadcast all over the world, as they were. As far as we know, they did not claim to have any particularly engaging issue for which they took hostages and killed people except that they were programmed to kill and cause maximum destruction.

• Does this incident reveal a new culture of instant attention, which these young men would never dream of getting in their lives devoid of any hope beyond the horizon? 
• Does this mean that alienated young men with no opportunities for structuring their lives with meaning will become prey to the brainwashing of devious evildoers just because we all live in an age of egoistic self-gratification? 
• Is it because the young men have an emptiness within, which the evildoers spot quickly and fill eagerly with their warped programming? 
• Is it the same psychology driving people to take part in programmes like Idols and Big Brother? Has it now become celebrity terrorism?

A Different Solution to Terrorism

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So far, in many countries the response to terrorism has been to fortify borders. Stretching this vision to its limits – can we have a fortress USA, a fortress UK, China or India in this contemporary world of globalization, transparency, and interdependence? Hardly tenable but this vision helps utterly incompetent leaders get to power and keep their power, more so in Western democracies.

A survey, funded by the National Center for Food Protection and Defense, conducted over the Internet by TNS-NFO 2005 among 4,260 U.S. residents over the age of sixteen found that 98 percent of U.S. residents believed there will be another terrorist attack during their lifetime. In the USA, $55 billion was spent in 2006 to fight terrorism, 0,8% of it on Intelligence and warning.

• What about seriously directing efforts and a part of these billions at creating social, educational, and entrepreneurial structures that would give meaning to the lives of young men in areas where life is bleak?

By working in closer cooperation with local sensible non-political leaders, if all the countries afflicted by terrorism would spend money and effort in making road, building houses, schools, hospitals, and energy production facilities for the local people to start earning their livelihood decently, would that drive most of the young angry men away from the clutches of the evil machinators?

Will the examples of success stories and viable opportunities, bring hope to them; the hope of living good, meaningful lives by not having that gaping emptiness within for the machinators of evil and hatred to fill in? Further, it would be a great boost to the struggling economies of the developed world, as this would give jobs to their workers too.

Why not give this method a try?

Why are Seats Empty at Beijing?

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was a spectacular show. The entire choreography was flawlessly executed, with each minute detail falling in place to showcase China’s might and prowess to the world. 

But people could notice an embarrassing factor even at the most spectacular show on the planet – empty seats.

Officially all the events are sold out. According to a BBC report, Wang Wei, a senior official with the Beijing organising committee (Bocog), said empty seats was not a problem unique to Beijing and other Olympics had experienced similar problems. This spokesman blamed the weather for being too hot and too humid and then too rainy. 

The Chinese authorities have tried to address the problem of empty stands by hiring volunteers, dressing them up in yellow and filling the empty seats to act as cheerleaders. They have been given instructions to cheer for both teams to improve the atmosphere in the stands.

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Some people claim that many of the corporate seats are empty because the corporate tickets were handed out only the day before to prevent blackmarketeering and busy executives can’t make it to the events at such short notice.

Is there some other explanation to why the stands are empty? Do the local Chinese see the sports events as strange and Western? 

Do the Chinese people find the idea of paying hefty prices for attending mass sports events too strange? Are the tickets too expensive?

Beijing Olympic Tickets Terribly Expensive

For example, tickets for softball started at $100 for pool play and go up to $400+ for the gold medal game. In Athens, the same tickets were going for about $10 and $40 respectively. The tickets for the Men’s single tennis finals in 2008, are priced at 545€ plus 29€ for delivery charges. According the People's Daily in China, the average monthly income in Beijing is 227 US dollars. Domestic sports fans would definitely find the ticket prices rather expensive.

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The Sydney 2000 Olympic record for ticket sales was 91% of available tickets breaking the previous record for ticket sales of more than 82% set in Atlanta.

Rumours of terrorism drove crowds away from the preliminary competitions of the games in Athens, but attendance picked up soon.

What about the foreign sport fans in Beijing? 

Is it too difficult and expensive getting visas, finding accommodation, getting tickets or are spectators choosing to watch events on TV from the comfort of their homes?