Before you set fire to that pile of Koran books, please let me read one of them.
Atta looks and was one real sick puppy though. No doubt about that. The word "hate" just about describes him.
Here is another OBL story. Female point of view..
dailytelegraph.co.uk
THERE are fleeting moments when I think that the Taliban might actually have a point when they say that Western women are amoral. One came last week, when all around me other women started proclaiming how much they fancied Osama bin Laden.
I heard: "He's got beautiful, brooding eyes", "He's cool: when Bush was getting all worked up, Osama was just sipping tea in his tent." One woman who was in Washington when the hijacked plane struck the Pentagon, actually said that "he has a sort of animal magnetism: you feel that here's a man who could protect you". Another said: "He certainly wouldn't dither."
Please don't write to tell me that this is in bad taste. I already know that, and so do they, because they often put in caveats such as: "Although I utterly condemn what he has done," and, "Of course, if he was in my flat I'd hand him straight over to the police." But that's the point: inside their heads, Osama is already inside their flat.
It isn't the shy student Osama of the Seventies, in his trendy flares and skinny-rib sweater, to whom they are attracted; it is the turbaned Osama of today, issuing edicts of mass destruction from his impenetrable cave. Part of bin Laden's appeal, I think, is that he doesn't seem quite real. He has never claimed responsibility for the US attacks, or been filmed with Western heads of state. He appears only in his own broadcasts from distant Afghanistan, looking like a quasi-mythological cross between a villain from a James Bond film and a Rudolph Valentino sheikh.
I don't find bin Laden in the least attractive, but even I can see that his soulful appearance has been one of fate's little jokes. Just as a truly gentle man can have the mug of an East End prize-fighter, so bin Laden in repose has the dignified visage of a kindly, peaceable man: the sort from whom one would not hesitate to seek directions after a wrong turning in Kabul. For his bashful female admirers in the West, however, his allure is tangled up in something much deeper and messier than that.
Plenty of women (and men too) are viscerally attracted both to men with good looks, and those with a strong whiff of cordite. A combination of the two creates a powerful, if indefensible, magnetism. Che Guevara would now be remembered chiefly for his enthusiastic use of repression and his disastrous grasp of economics, were it not for that famous black-and-white photograph of him in a black beret, staring moodily out from his chiselled face.
Bin Laden is not Che Guevara, but he still looks pretty sharp on a T-shirt. In fact, he looks a bit like Che in reverse: Guevara had a black beret, a mesmeric stare and a pale face, and bin Laden has a white turban, a mesmeric stare and a dark face. Quite apart from how bin Laden looks, however, is the mere fact of what he is: a man with sufficient power to cause enormous destruction, and continuing consternation, in the West.
There is a craven streak in the female psyche, the unspeakable bit that Sylvia Plath meant when she wrote that "every woman adores a Fascist / the boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you". The brute doesn't even need to be handsome: look at how Hitler, a strutting, greasy-haired creature, set silly Unity Mitford all a-quiver: "Yesterday we had lunch with the Fuhrer," she wrote home in 1936, "it was wonderful and he was simply heavenly."
The armchair biologists will no doubt tell us that it is rooted in some atavistic female need to ally ourselves with the fiercest and nastiest warrior in the tribe. But the admiration for bin Laden is also tangled up, I think, in Stockholm syndrome: the curious phenomenon whereby people who are taken hostage end up identifying with their kidnappers.
Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network have spread an amorphous cloud of apprehension over the West. It hangs over the Western women who fancy bin Laden as much as everyone else: for who knows what form a terrorist attack could take, or where it might land? In their fantasies, however, Osama is not their persecutor, but their protector: they are the one person he will not allow to be hurt.
Yeats once wrote that "in dreams begin responsibilities", and I think I agree. If you allow yourself to fancy bin Laden, you've got to take on board his penchant for mass murder. No, no, say the others, that's precisely the wrong point. Fantasies are where one loses all responsibility. That is why, as one nags one's husband into doing the washing up, one can freely fantasise about a gun-toting gangster who would rather die than put his hand into a Marigold.
I don't much go for terrorists or dictators: their chosen cologne of other people's misery is too strong, and the closer that misery comes to home the fouler it smells. And the truth is that such men are usually too obsessed with their cause to have any time for women either. Move on, Osamaniacs. It isn't you he's interested in. |
